The best martial-arts TV ever made is streaming on the most overlooked service

It’s hard to make an action TV show. The whole point of TV, at least from a business perspective, is that it’s generally cheaper to make than movies, but if your show revolves around action scenes, that’s going to cost a lot of money. Unless your show becomes hugely popular, you’re going to be left with an expensive dud.

And yet some brave TV shows do try and run this race, which is admirable even if they don’t quite make it to the finish line. Into the Badlands is one of the best.

Into the Badlands gives you a wild new world to explore

Mind the unchecked bloodshed

Into the Badlands ran for three seasons on AMC between 2015 and 2019. It’s set far in our future after a series of natural disasters and wars have set civilization back thousands of years. The Badlands refer to an area between the Rocky Mountains and the Mississippi River that’s ruled over by feudal warlords called barons. Each baron is served by slaves called “cogs,” prostitutes called “dolls,” and commands an army of warriors called “clippers.”

Already, you can tell that Into the Badlands, like any good sci-fi or fantasy franchise, has a lot of world-building. And it goes deeper. In this post-apocalyptic world, guns have been banned, since they were such a problem in the wars that led to the world’s ruin. Instead, people use swords, crossbows, and martial arts to fight.

And that gets to the real point of Into the Badlands. The show basically exists as an excuse to string together elaborately choreographed martial arts battles. Our main character, Sunny, is played by Daniel Wu, a professional actor and martial artist who’s actually good enough to hold down the show’s many fight scenes. Sunny is a clipper working for Quinn (Marton Csokas), the most brutal baron in the Badlands. Clippers aren’t allowed to marry or have children, so when Sunny gets his lover Veil (Madeleine Mantock) pregnant, he begins devising a way to leave the Baron’s territory and get a fresh start on life with his family.

So we have a lead character, a compelling conflict, and a professional cast of martial artists. Let the fists fly.

Into the Badlands is a gorgeous action series

It’s a love letter to martial arts movies

The fight scenes on Into the Badlands are incredibly fun to watch. They’re clearly paying homage to wuxia movies like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, where the fight scenes are intense, balletic, and cheerfully untethered to real-world physics. Combatants float, flutter, and fly around the arena, performing impossible feats of strength to the delight of all.

That said, because Into the Badlands is a fantasy series, it has a lore-based explanation for for all of this is done; Sunny and other fighters possess supernatural “gifts” that allow them to perform incredible feats of martial arts. That becomes a useful plot device, as everyone’s gifts become bargaining chips in an never-ending battle for control of the Badlands.

None of this is to say that the story itself isn’t worth taking in, because it is. We come to care for characters like Sunny, Veil, and M.K. (Aramis Knight), a teenager with a powerful secret whom Sunny takes under his wing. In the second season, the show introduces Bajie, a con artist and former monk who becomes Sunny’s most trusted ally. Played by veteran comic actor Nick Frost (Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz), Bajie adds a lot of humor to the show, giving it a few more tones to play with.

Into the Badlands is bright, beautiful, and bloody

A shame about the ending

Another thing that stands out about Into the Badlands is its use of color. The show is bright and vibrant, with reds and blues and greens that pop out of the screen. It’s a brutal action show, but also a beautiful one.

Unfortunately, Into the Badlands was canceled in the midst of its third season, after the high budget and low viewership finally caught up with it. The show gets to tie up most of its major plotlines, but others are left dangling. The final episode is a terrific episode of Into the Badlands, but a disappointing series finale, since there was clearly more story left to tell.

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Why did it have to be AMC+?

Even so, Into the Badlands is more than complete enough to be worth recommending. Its biggest drawback may be that the easiest way to watch it is to subscribe to AMC+, and not people are willing to do that.

For context, Netflix has over 300 million subscribers while AMC+ has just over 10 million. It’s almost like AMC is keeping the show prisoner behind the AMC+ paywall. If you like, you can watch the first episode for free on Sling TV and then decide if you want to pay for AMC+ for at least a month. Into the Badlands has only 32 episodes, so that should be enough time for you to binge the whole thing.

Alternatively, you could wait and hope that AMC makes the show available to watch elsewhere, which is possible. You can watch Mad Men, one of the network’s signature dramas, on HBO Max, while The Walking Dead and Breaking Bad are available to stream on Netflix. interview With The Vampire, which is the best AMC show that no one is watching, is also on Netflix. Maybe Into the Badlands will eventually join them.