Early in the first season of Cobra Kai, Johnny Lawrence is seen standing in a strip mall parking lot and staring at the faded sign of his old dojo. This scene says everything you need to know about what the show is trying to do. It’s not just bringing back an old franchise. It asks if the guy that everyone in 1984 thought was the bully might have been right. Even though it seemed silly at first, that one question kept the show going for six seasons, two streaming platforms, and a level of fan loyalty that most martial arts shows never even come close to.
The facts back it up. Cobra Kai first aired on YouTube Red in 2018 and then moved to Netflix in 2020. It has since been one of the most popular English-language shows on Netflix. On Rotten Tomatoes, critics gave it high marks, and early seasons had scores well above 90%. Still, ratings don’t fully explain why people liked the show so much. Other than not being action-packed like most martial arts movies, this one has a warmth to it and doesn’t treat its characters like disposable objects. Johnny Lawrence, played by William Zabka, went from being a joke in 1980s pop culture to being one of the most likable characters on streaming TV. That’s pretty hard to do, and it’s clear that the writers really cared about getting it right.
At least in the beginning, Cobra Kai worked because it changed the point of view. Daniel LaRusso wrote the first Karate Kid movie. When Cobra Kai gave the microphone to the other side, he saw something surprisingly human: a middle-aged man drinking Coors Banquet in a messy apartment while thinking about what went wrong in his life. The show didn’t make fun of him for it. It let him be messy, stubborn, and wrong a lot of the time, but still someone you could root for. Daniel played by Ralph Macchio, on the other hand, wasn’t as simple as everyone thought he would be. The tension between two flawed men who are both sure they are doing the right thing gave the show a backbone that fight scenes alone could not have.
Cobra Kai may have reached its best point between seasons two and three. Fans think that while the later seasons were still fun, they started using old plots and relying too much on teen drama that didn’t always work. The tournament plots became easier to guess. Villains showed up, were saved, and then new ones came in. There wasn’t as much magic in season six after it was split into three parts. But the show was always funny, even when it wasn’t doing well. There’s something to be said for a show that knows what it is and never tries to be something else.
It’s interesting to see how Cobra Kai stacks up against other martial arts shows. Based on Bruce Lee’s original idea, Warrior had more intense fight scenes and more historical background. The world-building in Into the Badlands was very ambitious, and the action was very cinematic. It could be said that both were braver. But neither of them really caught the attention of a lot of people like Cobra Kai did, and neither of them started the kind of cultural conversation that continued for years with memes, debates about who was the real bad guy, and Halloween costumes. It’s not always about being the smartest to be the best. It’s not always about being loved the most.
It depends on what you use to decide if Cobra Kai really is the best karate show ever. Most likely not if it’s fight realism. It has a lot of emotional depth for a martial arts show. If it’s just a show that you can watch again and again, the kind that you put on on a lazy Sunday and watch all three episodes in one sitting, then yes, it’s hard to argue against it. The show took an idea that shouldn’t have worked and made it into something people really cared about. These days, streaming is full of forgettable shows and movies, so that’s more important than most critics think.
