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The premiere of AMC’s Into the Badlands (2015) broke viewership records for cable television, marking the third occurrence of that claim AMC show premieres in 2015 alone. The new series grabbed the record as the third-most watched cable premiere of all time, just behind Fear the Walking Dead (2015) and Better Call Saul (2015) on the network earlier in the year.

The first episode of the six-installment series established that Into the Badlands aims to be a genre-bending show, capable of appealing to a wide range of audiences. Though it bills itself primarily as a martial arts character drama, martial arts shows haven’t historically been able to reach mainstream appeal with American audiences. Into the Badlands evolves the concept into something more unclassifiable. In their discussion of the series pilot, The LA Times described Into the Badlands as “a post-apocalyptic martial-arts samurai steampunk quasi-medieval neo-antebellum feudal Southern western film noir.” That is a mouthful of a description, but largely representative of the show’s many thematic and stylistic elements.

The series opens as Sunny (Daniel Wu) rides a motorcycle down a road surrounded by blood red poppies. Into the Badlands’ color palette is saturated and bright, heightening its element of fantasy and drawing attention to its gore, while contrasting the tonally darker and subdued moments. Sunny is a “clipper,” a type of henchman who serves the interest of a Baron of the Badlands. There are seven Barons in total; overseers who harnessed control and authority in a post-war world. Sunny’s Baron is Quinn (Marton Csokas), the preeminent Baron of the Badlands, whose reign is soon to be threatened. As Sunny explains in the intro, “This world is built on blood. Nobody is innocent here.” His first course of action is to single-handedly dispatch a group of nomads without breaking a sweat. The scene gives a taste of the series’ attitude, beautiful choreography, outlandish costumes, and love of bone-crunching sound effects.

The Badlands are a place of yet-unspecified scope—people simply believe nothing lies beyond them. The Badlands look a lot like Louisiana, where the show is filmed, and Baron Quinn’s southern neo-antebellum plantation owner image comes off as somewhat of an angry Dothraki version of Leonardo Dicaprio’s Calvin Candie from Django Unchained (2012), living in a war-fortified version of Candieland. The time is certainly some sort of gunless, dystopian post-apocalypse, brought on by devastating events we may never be privy to understanding. Sunny’s opening dialogue cues us into the knowledge that the world has been this way for a while - “The wars were so long ago nobody even remembers.” It looks like present day but is supposedly the future, and boasts cars and fighting styles of the past.

Where the series has its bright, violent moments of martial arts samurai fun, it equally understands the value of darkness. A scene late in the pilot episode finds Sunny and a classic car alone in a dark, rainy street. He can sense something is amiss, and the dread builds through atmosphere in a cinematic film noir use of camera and lighting before he’s attacked by men in dark suits. A slow-motion shot watches raindrops bounce from the brims of a derby hat. A melee takes Sunny and an assailant through the door of a building, follows their fight via shadows, then finds them crashing through a parlor window and back out into the street like a classic old western. Sunny dances through combat like Gene Kelly with a sword.

As much as action is a big part of Into the Badlands, it also follows the AMC tradition of doubling as a character drama. Many seeds are planted that reveal budding conflicts between the Barons, conflicts within Quinn’s own family, and Sunny’s place within the mix. He has his own set of issues, too, as he has impregnated a woman—an act punishable by death for a Clipper.

It is also quite clear that the show’s characters aren’t entirely human, or at least, not without the influence of some fantastic force. Midway through the pilot, a seemingly weak young boy spills a few drops of blood and turns into an ultimate rage monster during a Norman Bates-ish moment of blackout. This ability does not go unnoticed, and by the end of the pilot we discover he’s being pursued by other Barons.

While Into the Badlands certainly isn’t a show for everyone (as it requires tolerance of a fair bit of gore and violence), it does build from a spattering of genre styles and contain a spread of storylines that range from the action-packed to the dramatic, albeit without much nuance. Most of the characters are going to need some serious fuel to become more personality and less prop, seeing as none but Sunny are given much opportunity for dimension in the pilot. But if nothing else, Into the Badlands offers entertainment on a pulpy fun level that should appeal to most viewers at one point or another within the episode, and allow for the directors and writers to explore a variety of creative cinematic methods of bringing the story to life.