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WITH THE premiere of the fifth season of Cobra Kai, Netflix has killed off what was one of the most original and intelligent series in recent years.
Cobra Kai premiered on YouTube Red in 2018 and automatically became a cult series. The series not only tapped into 80s nostalgia — so trendy lately — but also put a really bold and innovative spin on the original film.
When Netflix acquired the series after its second season and began distributing it exclusively, it brought the series to the mainstream, making it a hit and a cultural phenomenon. It was not until season four that Netflix began to take over its production, which sowed doubts about its future. The fifth season is the grim confirmation that Netflix has blown up the essence of Cobra Kai, turning it into a lousy series.
The success of Cobra Kai during its first seasons can be attributed to two factors. First, a very sympathetic and innovative premise: taking an 80’s classic and turning it on its head to tell the story from the point of view of the film’s villain, Johnny Lawrence, and to challenge the hero Daniel LaRusso.
This innovative premise was underpinned by a very well thought out script, which managed to keep nostalgia balanced with the incorporation of new young protagonists, balanced comedy with drama, and in which the karate-themed action was merely incidental to the development of its plots and characters.
The second pillar of the series was that it didn’t fall into the hackneyed woke narrative. In fact, it was arguably one of the few anti-woke series. Its protagonist, Johnny Lawrence, anchored in the 80s, served as a perfect contrast to the woke trend. It was as if we were dealing with a character who had been cryogenically frozen for decades and, upon waking up in the present day, scoffed at where progressivism had taken the world.
Netflix butchers Cobra Kai
That a series so contrary to the imposed progressive narrative was succeeding was to be welcomed, but it was odd. When Netflix acquired the rights to Cobra Kai, many of us feared it would turn it into a woke show, as the production company is known for being one of the spearheads of this ideology.
However, the fifth season is not woke, it is just plain bad. Netflix has turned it into a shadow of its former self. At times, it seems to be watching a Nickelodeon series. Both aesthetically and thematically, it is closer to Henry Danger than to what Cobra Kai once was.
Netflix has reduced Cobra Kai to a pop phenomenon for pre-teens. (EFE, Francisco Guasco)
While in the first seasons the martial arts were simply the vehicle to develop complex characters (both adults and youth), in the fifth season karate becomes the center of the narrative, with absurd and implausible fights that seem to be taken from the Power Rangers.
Cobra Kai was never The Godfather, nor did it claim to be, but it was an intelligent comedy that the whole family could enjoy, the characters were complex and traversed a scale of grays, it made the case that violence was sometimes necessary in the face of the puerile pacifism of “safe spaces” and, despite its light tone, it was a credible series with its feet on the ground.
Season five, however, is nonsensical. The villain, Terry Silver, is evil as hell just because. The motivation for his evil goes no further than “I’m evil because I’m rich, and I’m rich because I’m evil.”
But not only is this character out of step with what the series once was, but all the characters have become cartoonish, and the story has lost all touch with reality, moving between an overblown romantic soap opera and a mindless brawl series. Now even Mrs. LaRusso is getting into bar fights, the bad guys’ karate team has an oriental guy with an eye patch to show us how badass they are, and we can even witness fights to the death with sais and katanas as if they were the Ninja Turtles.
The nonsense is such that, if there were a sixth season and merely continued its progression, we could find ourselves with a series in which its protagonists will have superpowers or bionic limbs and begin to fight to save the world from an invasion of karate aliens. But better not to give Netflix any ideas.
Ignacio Manuel García Medina, Business Management teacher. Artist and lecturer specialized in Popular Culture for various platforms. Presenter of the program "Pop Libertario" for the Juan de Mariana Institute. Lives in the Canary Islands, Spain // Ignacio M. García Medina es profesor de Gestión de Empresas. Es miembro del Instituto Juan de Mariana y conferenciante especializado en Cultura Popular e ideas de la Libertad.
Social Networks: @ignaciomgm