On November 15, AMC will premiere “Into the Badlands,” a new show created by Alfred Gough and Miles Millar. The show centers on a fighter and a young boy, played by Daniel Wu and Aramis Knight, who journey across a post-apocalyptic world helping people who are in need and fighting those that oppose them. Though the show has yet to premiere on national television, it has already drawn comparisons to FX’s “Sons of Anarchy” and HBO’s “Game of Thrones.”
The creators of the shows said that AMC, home to shows “The Walking Dead” and “Mad Men,” was the only network they had pitched the show to. “It was just our luck that AMC was looking for an action show and we just happened to have one,” Millar said to deadline.com.
The two creators based the show on “Journey to the West,” a novel from the sixteenth century written by Wu Ch’eng-En. Most western audiences may know the story as it was adapted into Akira Toriyama’s world famous “Dragon Ball” series. Though not animated, the two shows have one thing in common and that is, it’s action packed. “Miles and I have always been fans of martial arts and martial arts movies and which is a genre not on television at the moment,” Gough said to Variety magazine, “It was a passion project of ours.”
Though the story is based on eastern literature, the post apocalyptic setting is a blend of both east and west. “The settings and landscapes are made of the far east meets the American south,” Knight said to Deadline. “There’s a huge mix of so many different feels and themes from Western to Steampunk to the Creole vibe of New Orleans to Oriental.”
The martial arts on the show is performed by the cast members themselves, who had to go into rigorous training in able to perform the fights on the shows, including Daniel Wu, who was an action actor in Hong Kong. “It’s a mixed bag,” said Stephen Fung, one of the shows producers and action choreographers. “We didn’t want to have one specific style. It’s everything: different styles of martial arts that we blended together different people. It’s actually one of the first things that we did when we got the script, we separated the character’s personality and determined the weapons they would use.”
Daniel Wu said to International Business times that the show is not just about violence but a journey of spirituality. “The spirituality of Martial arts is important because there needs to be balance. There needs to be the philosophy of martial arts to balance out the violence or else it just becomes all about the violence. We say the story is very loosely based on ‘Journey to the West’, which is how Monkey brought Buddhism from India to China. It’s about all these challenges he meets on the way and how they transform him from a rebellious, naughty Monkey King into a Buddha himself. So, that’s the real spiritual backbone of the show—you see these characters looking for something greater than what they have known.”
Jimaur Calhoun
Arts & Entertainment Director