Depending on your age, your first introduction to showbiz martial arts might have been the black-and-white Phantom Agents era, which means you spent most of your youth hanging from a tree using one palm to swipe the other in the fashion required to spray the back garden, and Lola the dog, with a barrage of shuriken.
If you're a smidge younger, then you would have grown up with the Charlie's Angels-style of martial arts, which usually involved karate-chopping people, typically while you were wearing a bikini, and most likely while you were also undercover at a massage parlour, airline stewardess school or nurses college.
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And if you were younger again, then martial arts to you would mean dreary, dark action movies full of turgid he-killed-my-cousin/brother/mother/wife/sister plotlines and actors with names like Jean-Paul Van Seagall, wearing too much fake tan and always getting the girl. The same one who was only ever in those kinds of movies.
Which brings us to Into the Badlands (Showcase, Wednesdays, 7.35pm) which manages to somehow live up to everything you ever knew about martial arts as a genre and, simultaneously, blow it out of the water.
First of all, of particular interest to an Australian audience, is the fact that this series is loosely based on the Chinese story which, decades ago, gave birth to the television series Monkey.
Now, before you start blowing air on your index and middle finger, and calling random people Pigsy and Sandy, this isn't Monkey. It is a much more sophisticated take on Journey to the West (Monkey's source material), beautifully blended into an action series with a real sense of authenticity. In a post-Breaking Bad world, a lot of shows have jostled for space, but Into the Badlands is one of the few with class, style and originality.
Journey to the West is re-tooled here into a sort of future America where society has broken down and the scarred landscape is ruled by plantation-owning overlords who control vast slave populations and engage each other via armies of "Clippers", skilled martial artists who have escaped slavery through their skill in hand-to-hand combat.
What's so fascinating is that it could all collapse in a heap of cliches and worn-out ideas, but it doesn't. The writing is sharp and the first episode, directed by David Dobkin and written by Alfred Gough and Miles Millar, bolts along at a cracking pace.
Daniel Wu, who also co-produces the series, plays Sunny, the leading warrior in the service of Quinn (Marton Csokas), one of the most powerful overlords in the so-called "Badlands". From there it's a fast-paced, high-kicking tornado of action.
Perhaps the biggest challenge for any new US-scripted series is to escape the fact that new US-scripted series are being churned out faster than they can be written. Which means the market, once dominated by a handful of truly brilliant series, is now crowded with a lot of middling performers.
It has made finding new series tough. FX's The Bastard Executioner, from Sons of Anarchy producer Kurt Sutter, struggles because it's simply inaccessible, lost in density, violence and a sense that there is no way in. Other shows struggle for the opposite reason: they're simply not distinct enough to stand out in a crowded market.
Into the Badlands isn't Breaking Bad, but no show could be. Too soon, perhaps. But Into the Badlands is a compelling piece of narrative, cleverly drawn from the DNA of proper mythology and hewn into something rough, unsettling and still palatable.
