You know what's funny about the people who say mean things? There's a certain part of Twitter that is literally shouting into the void, and then sometimes when the void shouts back it's like, "Whoa! I wasn't expecting that. I got called out." And then if you have a conversation, you find out they like something or they like that or they have questions about that.

And having those mystical elements you see in Asian cinema and certainly Asian martial arts cinema, it's something that we wanted to begin to introduce - the idea of spirituality and the idea of there being something else out in the world besides people who are great fighters.

To AMC's credit, I think what they saw was the show doesn't exist in the marketplace. They knew that there was a hunger for a martial arts show. They also knew that you have this strong tradition of martial arts cinema, so even though it's not branded by a novel or a comic book or an old movie or something, we do have the genre itself, which people love.

Miles and I had been looking to do a martial arts show for some time. Our first two movies that we wrote were "Lethal Weapon 4" and "Shanghai Noon" with Jackie Chan. Then we sort of got pulled into the superhero world, but then you look around at what's not on television and there wasn't really a martial arts shows. There are shows that do martial arts to a degree, but there's not a martial arts show.

You know what's funny about the people who say mean things? There's a certain part of Twitter that is literally shouting into the void, and then sometimes when the void shouts back it's like, "Whoa! I wasn't expecting that. I got called out." And then if you have a conversation, you find out they like something or they like that or they have questions about that.

Some of the key components, we wanted it to be so far into the future that you weren't talking about our time. I was joking that the AMC cinematic universe is after the zombie apocalypse by hundreds and hundreds of years.

With a television show, it's about fighting to get it on the screen every week. It's like going into battle, and you have to fight these fights. Some are big fights, some are skirmishes, some you can come to detente on, but it's always a fight.