With notional roots in a story from 16th-century Chinese literature, AMC’s new action drama “Into the Badlands” imagines a U.S. Midwest centuries from now, in which successive catastrophes have set civilization back to feudalism.

Territorial prairies are patrolled by sword-wielding enforcers — known as Clippers — who loyally protect the interests of their respective barons. Technology is low and illiteracy is high; most people consider themselves lucky to live in indentured servitude. There are motorcycles but no guns.

The show’s not making any grand statement about the Second Amendment or the loss of a well-armed citizenry; it’s merely a way for “Into the Badlands” to steady its true aim as a martial-arts free-for-all, full of grandly choreographed showdowns and grisly encounters with swords, knives, hatchets, feet and fists.

Premiering Sunday in a post-“Walking Dead” sweet spot, “Into the Badlands” is pure genre display that has been gussied up, both literally and conceptually, in an attempt to broaden its appeal to viewers who may not necessarily be inclined to get worked up over the grandiloquent nobility of such fare. The aesthetic result mashes up traditional martial-arts flicks with a steampunky sense of plantation politics. The hairstyles and costuming pilfer a bit from the quasi-Victorian “Hunger Games” milieu; it’s all similarly post-apocalyptic, where the inhumanity and dystopian cruelty are a given.

Daniel Wu, a Chinese American actor with significant martial-arts bona fides, stars as Sunny, a Clipper who works for an ill-tempered baron named Quinn (Marton Csokas, sporting fearsome, Brooklyn barbershop facial hair), who controls the poppy-field opiate trade.

Encountering a nomadic team of bandits, Sunny easily and bloodily dispatches them with elegant swordplay and superhuman acrobatics, mostly because his enemies always form a traditional circle around him and await their turn to be killed, in accordance with the genre’s laughably honorable ideas about what makes a fair fight. (If you struggle with the plausibility, simply look on it as a form of dance.)

Afterward Sunny opens a locked trunk that contains a teenage boy named M.K. (Aramis Knight), who, it turns out, knows how to get to a faraway, mythic city that exists beyond the Badlands.

Subplots and multiple characters also form a somewhat traditional circle around our hero: Baron Quinn’s tyranny becomes unbearable to Sunny, who endeavors to help M.K. escape a rigorous boot camp for potential new Clippers. A rival oil baroness, known as The Widow (Emily Beecham), is waging war with Baron Quinn and practically oozing out of her corsets and ornate stockings with seething resentment; everyone else’s story gets tangled up in the violent animosity between the two. The body count soars as Sunny faces off with what seems like a few dozen of the Widow’s hatchet-wielding warriors.

In its overall sweep and style, “Into the Badlands” struggles to find a bigger idea or compelling narrative that could really draw a crowd and keep it entertained. If the surge in new television shows is teaching us anything these days about our culture, it’s that everybody’s got their thing, which means “Into the Badlands” will probably scratch a few outlying itches in a satisfying way.

For all I know, it could be a huge hit with the blood-and-gore gang, but, given so many other choices on a Sunday night, “Into the Badlands” just seems like more stiffly melodramatic — if highly disciplined — nonsense.