Cobra Kai, the most unlikely smash hit of the streaming age, is back on Netflix for the first batch of episodes from its sixth and final season- five more episodes drop in November, with the final five due early next year – and it’s as absurd, unlikely and shamelessly enjoyable as ever. Set in a fantastically unimaginable Californian valley town where everyone is obsessed with karate to the exclusion of practically anything and everything else, Cobra Kai’s success hinges not just on lingering nostalgia for the original Karate Kid movie franchise (the show has long since found its own groove) but also on the fact that it’s populated by hugely likeable, clean-cut characters and it keeps reinventing itself by just moving its narrative furniture around. Friendships are forged, friendships fall apart (often on the basis of a misunderstanding or misinformation), loyalties and built and then crumble and then rebuilt elsewhere around different people in slightly different situations. Cobra Kai is a bit like a TV game of chess where the pieces keep moving around the board without ever being knocked out but congregating in different areas and forming different combative alliances and partnerships.
Six seasons in, and the strain is showing just a little, but Cobra Kai is still wonderfully binge-able even as it starts to go round and round in circles. With the Cobra Kai dojo no longer existing, Johnny Lawrence (William Zabka) has teamed up – albeit reluctantly – with Daniel Russo (Ralph Macchio) in the Miyagi-do, whose stylings and teachings are slightly less aggressive than Johnny’s Eagle Fang and early episodes revolve around resolving the issues that still exists between Sam Russo (Mary Mouser) and her old enemy Tory Nichols (Peyton List) and Robby (Tanner Buchanan) and Kenny (Dallas Dupree Young). Meanwhile, the manipulative John Kreese (Martin Kove), who escaped custody the end of the last season (although the authorities don’t seem to be doing much to recapture him) recreates Cobra Kai by infiltrating a bunch of students training in the woods and the bulk of this first tranche of episodes centre otherwise on the upcoming worldwide karate tournament the Sekai Taikai due to be held in Barcelona and the selection process whereby the Miyagi-do chooses its representatives. If you’re familiar with the core young cast of Cobra Kai (although the series has now been running so long that some of them are clearly edging towards thirty), then you won’t be surprised at the six chosen to travel to Spain (boo, nepotism!) On the way, there are fights (perhaps not quite as slickly choreographed as in previous seasons), arguments, disagreements, and the usual inappropriate (but wildly funny) comments from Johnny Lawrence, who is a man out of his time struggling to adjust to the 21st century.
The real strength of Cobra Kai is that it’s just such feel-good TV. Bright, breezy, and genuinely looking like it was made in the 1980s, it grinds its gears like a beautifully well-oiled machine, and even if it’s now starting to show its age and looks a bit grey around the gills in places, it still guarantees a good time in the company of a bunch of sassy, good-natured characters in a world where bones are never broken (most of the characters should be permanently hooked up to life-support machines considering the number of brutal, savage beatings they’ve taken over the years), it never rains, and there’s always a moral to be had somewhere about the value of friendship even in times of great adversity. Cobra Kai – ha!
All seasons of COBRA KAI are available to stream now on Netflix.
