HBO swung and missed with this odd explanation.

Few shows have been bigger in the past few decades than The Walking Dead. Sure, it went on too long, crawling like a rotting zombie to the finish line those last several seasons, but before Negan (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) showed up and did you-know-what to Steven Yeun’s Glenn (we still can’t talk about it), The Walking Dead was the most talked about thing on TV. Alongside other big series like Mad Men and Breaking Bad, The Walking Dead put AMC on the map, turning it from a movie channel to a popular destination for must-see TV shows. AMC wasn’t the first choice for The Walking Dead, however. Just like Mad Men, the series was first shopped elsewhere, including to HBO, who knew a thing or two about crafting huge modern TV classics such as The Sopranos and Game of Thrones. However, HBO turned down The Walking Dead for a reason today that would make absolutely no sense.

‘The Walking Dead’ Joined ‘Mad Men’ and ‘Breaking Bad’ on AMC

AMC, short for American Movie Classics, began as a channel to watch some of the best older movies ever made. Eventually, the format changed, giving way to more current films, and most importantly, popular TV series started airing exclusively on AMC. The first big hit was Jon Hamm’s Mad Men in 2007, which was considered by many to be the best show on TV, and had the Emmys to prove it. Breaking Bad came out the next year and was an even bigger hit. In 2010 came The Walking Dead. There were no Madison Avenue ad men or meth dealers here, just an end of the world zombie apocalypse.

The Walking Dead was an immediate hit, with the pilot receiving 5.3 million viewers. It was filled with gory, undead grossness, but more than that, The Walking Dead had characters we cared about. We wanted to see if the leader, Rick Grimes (Andrew Lincoln), could save the day again. We wanted to daydream that we either were or were with the ultimate badass named Daryl Dixon (Norman Reedus). And we wanted to watch Glenn and Maggie (Lauren Cohan) fall in love. It was soul crushing when one of those characters died, whether it be at the teeth of a walker, or more often than not, by a villainous human like The Governor (David Morrissey) or Negan. The Walking Dead may have lost steam along the way, but those first several seasons will never be forgotten.

HBO Turned Down ‘The Walking Dead’ for Being Too Violent

Before The Walking Dead was a television series, it was a comic book written by Robert Kirkman. Much of what you see on the show is what happened in the books, with some major changes here and there, some for the better (Daryl didn’t even exist in the books!) and some for the worse, like how the show drastically changed Andrea’s (Laurie Holden) character from the source material. When the books reached peak popularity, the decision was made to start shopping it as a TV series, with legendary producer Gale Anne Hurd, who had been crucial in getting the likes of Alien and Terminator 2: Judgment Day made, tasked with finding The Walking Dead a television home.

As is customary, it was shopped around to several networks. Greg Nicotero, the effects genius behind the gory walker makeup, told the Huffington Post in 2012 what happened next. The Walking Dead was first pitched to NBC and HBO, but neither wanted to commit due to the amount of gore and violence in Kirkman’s books. They asked that this be toned down significantly first, but Hurd refused, saying, “No, thank you,” before taking the show elsewhere. It ended up, of course, with AMC. Nicotero said: “Thank goodness we wound up at AMC. They totally get this show. Right from the beginning, they’ve been completely trusting and supportive of what we’ve been trying to do with this series.”

‘The Walking Dead’ Was Better Off on AMC Instead of HBO

‘The Walking Dead’: All 11 Seasons Ranked From Worst to Best

It’s understandable why NBC would want The Walking Dead toned down for network TV, but what is impossible to understand is why HBO said the same thing. They are, after all, a network willing to show almost anything. Violence, gore, cursing, sex, and nudity galore can be found on HBO. This was the home of The Sopranos and Game of Thrones, which were filled with all of those things, yet a show about zombies eating people was too much?

It turned out to be the right choice for Hurd. Nicotero was correct in how supportive AMC was. They heavily promoted the series like no other, showing how proud they were of it, and even created a show that aired after each episode, The Talking Dead with Chris Hardwick, where, for eleven seasons, Hardwick would interview cast members and celebrity fans about that week’s episode. Sure, The Walking Dead could have gotten away with more on HBO, but nothing was really compromised for AMC. The only big difference you’ll see from the books to the series is the presentation of Negan. Kirkman’s version of the leather jacket clad bad guy dropped f-bombs in every other sentence, something that wouldn’t fly on AMC. That doesn’t mean he was any less chilling, but the constraints of AMC meant The Walking Dead was forced to try harder, making him menacing through his actions and mannerisms, not just his words.

That strategy can be seen in everything The Walking Dead did. They didn’t need to curse a lot or have graphic sex and nudity to succeed. That’s not what the series was about. It was about zombies ripping into human flesh, and even worse, those humans turning on each other while still alive and going to war when they should have been coming together. The fact that we could see zombie gore and people having their heads beaten in with a baseball bat on basic cable made it that much more shocking when not seen on the desensitizing HBO, where such things were expected. The Walking Dead did that so well that they didn’t need any more shocks added. We probably wouldn’t have been able to handle it.

The Walking Dead is available to watch on Netflix in the U.S.