JUST weeks after renewing one of its lowest-rated dramas ever for an improbable third season, the network that’s home to “The Walking Dead” (and, now, its spinoff) is taking its biggest gamble yet on the martial arts drama “Into the Badlands.”

    For starters, it’s the first show AMC has ever ordered straight to series without seeing a pilot. And thanks to the sheer number of intricately choreographed fight scenes, it’s also perhaps the most ambitious series the cable channel has put on air.

    “Once we started doing it, we figured out why no one’s ever done it on TV,” said Daniel Wu, star and executive producer.

    “To be able to do this level of action is crazy hard because the TV schedule is so tight. My experience in the past of doing martial arts films is to do three or four fight scenes over six months. We did 12 fight scenes in four months. The rain fight in the pilot is an homage to “The Grandmaster.” That rain fight took them 30 days to film; we shot ours in six days. So, it felt like making a Hong Kong movie.”

    Loosely based on the classic Chinese folktale “Journey to the West,” “Badlands” takes place in a future that feels decidedly like the past. In the wake of civilization’s destruction, guns have been banned and a feudal society has emerged that is governed by seven barons, each of whom defend their territory with an army of sword-wielding assassins known as clippers. The deadliest clipper is Sunny (Wu), who was raised from childhood by Quinn (Marton Csokas) and is now Quinn’s most trusted advisor in addition to being his chief ass-kicker.

    But just pulling off the high-intensity martial arts sequences wasn’t the only challenge facing the show in the early going: The creative team also had trouble finding a leading man. “You’re looking for someone waho is not only an actor, but is basically a professional athlete,” said Wu, who originally joined the project only as a producer to help with the fights. (SD-Agencies)