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.
Miles MillarThere are a couple of specific things about the show [Into the Badlands]. We didn't want to do a contemporary show, which is always "Chinese cop comes to New York, teams up with racist cop, together they fight crime..."
Miles MillarIt'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.
Miles MillarAnother 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.
Miles MillarI think that people are really hungry for original content. I think there's a sense of reboots and remakes, and we're lacking in any sense of originality in media. So, I think the people who want something like this which has a graphic novel feel or comic book feel but that is designed and created for the medium of television, I think that is something is very appealing to a lot of people.
Miles MillarWe 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."
Miles MillarAlso, having grown up in England, you walk around London, you're passing relics that are a thousand years old - the wall of London is a thousand years old. You don't talk about it, it's part of your everyday life. The idea that people are in these environments and talking about the past and what happened, it's irrelevant. It's all about living and in this world it was about surviving.
Miles Millar