The Absurdity of Cobra Kai is the Key to Its Success

Cobra Kai. Image courtesy of Netflix.

Like many people born in the 1980s, I binge-watched all 3 seasons of Cobra Kai on Netflix over several days and now I feel oddly sad that I have finished them all. The show is campy and absurd and ridiculous, but somehow it all comes together to create this sheer elemental joy. The first season is the best, while seasons two and three are trying to coast for as long as possible on what has proven to be an idea with essentially limitless potential: a story about warring karate dojos in the Valley.

This is why the Soviets failed when it came to centrally planned economies. The human condition is so batshit insane that there is no way you could make sense of it from the top-down. Sometimes there are going to be random bursts of inspired lunacy that make no sense on their face, but have more cultural staying power than you could possibly imagine. The Karate Kid and Cobra Kai are such things.

Breathing life into old properties simply to wring money out of an aging population who are afraid of death and want to bask in the eternal light of their youth is not a sure-fire formula for success. Disney has proved as much, filling cinemas with the putrefying corpses of its zombie IP. But Cobra Kai has one thing going for it that those Disney films don’t - it’s well made! There are so many ways that a show seeking to provide an update no one asked for on the characters from The Karate Kid could have turned out to be appallingly bad. But you can tell from the first short of Cobra Kai that the writers have actually but some time, thought, effort and legwork into the script.

The first scene opens on Johnny Lawrence in bed, and as he wakes up the camera takes us through his life in a few simple, wordless shots that establish all the backstory we need: empty beer cans, fried bologna for breakfast, a photo of a smiling kid that has the year 2010 written on it which tells us that he’s a deadbeat dad.

This is important expository and contextual information, and it is all delivered without someone turning to the camera and just saying it, the laziest solution to the problem of Setting Up The Story. You might think this is not really that important, but it shows that the writers have put a lot of thought into the character’s backstory and how to show it without beating you over the head with it. This was something that other great movies in the 1980s did. Nowadays, not so much.

And it’s particularly important because William Zabka as Johnny Lawrence is the backbone and internal organs of this show. Without him, I really don’t think it would work. Who was clamoring to see Ralph Macchio return as a successful, moralizing car salesman who keeps talking about the cook from Happy Days while making pancakes? Virtually all of the good jokes come from Lawrence as a man completely out of time, totally unfamiliar with the social norms and technology of this decade. And that is the absurd genius of this show.

It takes real guts to commit 100% to such a ridiculous concept - that warring karate dojos could spark a kind of middle class civil war in the Valley in the year 2018 - and then dial it up to 1,000 by making the main character literally be Encino Man. Johnny Lawrence is written as if, after the events of The Karate Kid, he was frozen in an iceberg only to be thawed out in 2018. He has no idea about anything that has happened in the 35 years in between The Karate Kid and Cobra Kai and a lot of the humor is about him adjusting to the times.

Everyone is in on the joke here, and that’s why it works. A full-throated embrace of the absurdity early on makes it easier to swallow things that happen later like three guys in their 60s and 70s wailing on each other with nunchucks in what is meant to be a dramatic and climactic fight scene. Of course it’s silly. We all know that. The show knows it too. And that is why it’s so enjoyable. That and the nostalgia and the actually very well-written and acted characters who the audience genuinely comes to care about and like even though the idea that karate is tearing this well-heeled little suburb apart is a ludicrous concept for a show that will very soon have 40 episodes.