[Into the Badlands] wasn't going to be two days of a splinter unit at the end of the shoot. The action and the martial arts had to be integral to the show. That's what makes it unique, that's what makes it special and different and ground-breaking. No one has attempted this before on American television.

It was very challenging in terms of making sure that everyone is distinct. Also, we wanted to have some Asian influences as well, so that it really is a mashup. We want evidence of our presence in this world, so you'll see there's an interest in technology, that there are not complex electronics. There's electricity in this world, but computers, circuits don't work.

We got the idea of nature almost encroaching. It's incredibly lush, incredibly green, we really popped the colors, lots of deep reds and the greens. It really has a sense of color which is unsettling actually and people are like, "It's so colorful."

I think we're always trying to avoid tropes. And I think that "Game of Thrones" has almost made killing people a cliche. For us, it wasn't about that. For six episodes, it's hard to invest in people, and I think when you kill a main character on television it really needs to mean something. So we certainly had talked about that, and I think we managed to juggle the ball to make a gripping, interesting and compelling finale. We feel that we didn't have to go there at this point because we had such few episodes.

Also, when we did "Smallville," we didn't have an opportunity to interact with people who watched the show. And see what they had to say and listen to criticism and listen to praise at the same time. So a lot of this is a new experience and it's very interesting and rewarding for us. I think we get honest feedback. You get hate. You get a lot of love as well. And I'm actually very curious what people think of the show. For us, it's been a passion project of ours, and an incredibly challenging show to make.

It's [Into the Badlands] something that's very, very different and I think that's why it divided critics initially because they didn't understand it or get it. They didn't understand or have a knowledge of what we were trying to do. Bringing in the Asian martial arts aesthetic to American television. For us, these are the people who will make the show a hit or a failure in future seasons. So it's for us to respect them and interact and see what they have to say.

We knew Terry Brooks' work, but we hadn't read the Shannara books. So, they sent us the book to read and we just loved the story and the characters. We thought it would make a very compelling season of television. We were like, "Someone is going to make this. Why don't we do it?"