Six is the short answer. Between its premiere on May 2, 2018, and its conclusion on February 13, 2025, Cobra Kai aired for six seasons, totaling 65 episodes. There’s the number if that’s all you’re looking for. The more intriguing tale, however, is how a show that debuted on YouTube Premium—a platform that most people viewed as a curiosity rather than a serious streaming destination—managed to run for more than seven years and gain a respectable place in the discourse surrounding prestige television.
The premise of Cobra Kai at the time of its release was one that begs for suspicion. Three decades later, the antagonist of a 1984 karate film is the subject of a sequel series that is delivered via a YouTube subscription service that hasn’t yet shown it can create anything with lasting cultural value. On YouTube Premium, the first two seasons came and went without receiving the widespread attention the program certainly deserved. The number of viewers was reasonable. Quietly, the reviews were favorable. However, the majority of casual viewers were never able to enter the space where the show was located.
That was altered by Netflix. The show reached an audience that had never had the opportunity to see it before when the platform purchased Cobra Kai and published Seasons 1 and 2 in 2020. Early in the pandemic, when people were watching long-form television at a rate that made nearly everything discoverable, the timing was favorable. But the real work was done by the quality of the show. When Season 3 debuted on Netflix in January 2021, it attracted enough views to be nominated for an Emmy for Outstanding Comedy Series. A year prior, this recognition would have appeared improbable for a YouTube follow-up to a 1980s movie franchise.
Seasons 1 thru 6 follow Daniel LaRusso and Johnny Lawrence (played by Ralph Macchio and William Zabka, both returning from the original films) as they deal with middle age, rival dojos, challenging kids, and long-standing rivalries that continue to take on new forms. The show made good use of Martin Kove’s reappearance as John Kreese and Thomas Ian Griffith’s portrayal of Terry Silver, both of whom were given significantly more material than the original movie permitted. The young ensemble cast, which included Xolo Maridueña, Tanner Buchanan, Mary Mouser, Peyton List, and Jacob Bertrand, gave the series a second generation of tales to run alongside the legacy characters. This structural choice ultimately prevented the show from being just nostalgic.
The sixth and last season debuted in segments during 2024 and ended in February 2025. Because the choice to stop after six seasons was made public ahead of time, the writers and showrunners were able to plan ahead rather than improvise a resolution under pressure to cancel. The relative cohesion of the last episodes demonstrated this luxury, which not all long-running streaming series enjoy.
