Cobra Kai finds itself among television’s upper echelon with today’s 2021 Emmy nominations announcement, which named it as a nominee for Outstanding Comedy Series for January’s Netflix-debuted third season. The series, a decades-awaited sequel to The Karate Kid films, has seen its popularity increase exponentially after a migration from YouTube Premium to Netflix, on which the nominated season premiered. It’s quite the achievement when remembering the show’s less-than-auspicious 2018 launch.
The Emmy nominations highlight a second pandemic-altered year for the industry, further cementing the notion that the overwhelming majority of television’s heavy hitters now reside in the realm of streaming, rather than the airwaves. Notwithstanding a sole network sitcom straggler in Black-ish (ABC), the tonally-diverse comedy category proved no exception to that phenomenon, with Cobra Kai (Netflix) joining fellow streamers in Emily in Paris (Netflix), Hacks (HBO Max), The Flight Attendant (HBO Max), The Kominsky Method (Netflix), Pen15 (Hulu) and Ted Lasso (Apple TV+) for this year’s announced nominees. However, amongst this group, Cobra Kai’s path to this level was poetically serpentine, arguably making its nomination a sweeter achievement, win or lose.
Cobra Kai debuted back on May 2, 2018, widely perceived as an indulgent oddball nostalgia session. The 30-minute-set series manifested as a surreal continuation of the esteemed-but-long-dormant 1980s film franchise of The Karate Kid, which, decades earlier, had delivered a Crane Kick-dealt jolt to popular culture that spawned merchandise, catchphrases and surging memberships in dojos around the country off two entries in 1984 and 1986, respectively, only to lose momentum and marketability with the 1989 third film. The original franchise’s last big screen gasp, 1994 spinoff movie The Next Karate Kid, starred Hilary Swank as the new, angstier martial arts protégé to the returning sagely Mr. Miyagi, and performed abysmally, seemingly sealing the continuity’s end. That notion was further cemented with the 2005 passing of Miyagi actor Pat Morita. Indeed, even a 2010 reboot movie of The Karate Kid, which reinterpreted the primary sensei/student dynamic through Jackie Chan and young Jaden Smith, failed to revive the property. Therefore, it became a once-popular franchise that was discarded to a proverbial pop culture bin of ’80s relics like Porky’s and the Police Academy septet.
Consequently, The Karate Kid would be seen as a nostalgic punchline only referenced on occasion, notably in the 2007 music video by band No More Kings, titled “Sweep the Leg,” in which actor William Zabka fielded a tongue-in-cheek appearance as original movie bully Johnny. Likewise, the announcement years later of Cobra Kai as a revival television series—having corralled “where are they now?” level original stars Ralph Macchio and William Zabka—didn’t sound like anything that would generate more than some, “Look, it’s Daniel and Johnny—and they’re old!” kind of laughs amidst repeated film catchphrases before relegating the movie mythos back to its dormancy. Yet, the pièce de resistance to the show’s perceived kitsch was the very platform on which it would first reside, YouTube Premium, née YouTube Red, which was a lofty—some might say quixotic—attempt by the always-free Google-assimilated video giant to put original scripted content behind a paywall. Indeed, Cobra Kai seemed destined as a one-off curiosity that very few audiences—especially its initial Gen-X-tickling target—would even hear about, much less watch.