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.

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.

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.

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."

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.

There's a level of action unlike anything else on television. AMC always makes distinctive television and I think that certainly fits that requirement.