We liked the idea of introducing the audience to the world, and to show how much they had accepted or were confused by it. It was gratifying to see the people who embraced it immediately and understood it and got into it. They have tracked the characters through the six episodes, so it felt that now we can launch into the journey element of it. And really explore more of the Badlands.

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.

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.

Another thing we wanted to do, a lot of shows or movies that are in the future or the post-apocalyptic are very bleached, desaturated desert environments and we wanted to do the opposite of that. There's always talk about Chernobyl and the world that environment has recovered has become this idyllic, bizarrely refuge for wildlife.

There's always someone kicking guns. We wanted ["Badlands"] to be a world without guns and bullets, where martial arts was the form of fighting and defense and attack. Martial arts is king in this world. That was the first thing. We didn't want it to be a period piece either. We felt those are overdone and stuffy. That was what lead us to explore that area of science fiction and future, a world we can create and control.

[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.

People want to get immersed and lost in a world. They want to lean in and figure it out, and that's true of both of these shows. You don't know quite what it is, and that's great.