Every indication was that this would be yet another tired retread of an '80s staple, and even worse, a slightly smug parody that would embarrass its aging stars Ralph Macchio and William Zabka.
But against the odds, after viewing the first two episodes, I can safely say the series is excellent. It provides a great platform to show off Zabka's genuine acting chops. It's genuinely funny and jarringly realistic and to my mind, it provides a real blueprint for how these kinds of decades-after-the-fact reboots can actually be effective.
The most direct comparison I can think of is Creed, which came along long after it seemed as though the Rocky series had no place else to go creatively. That film succeeds on several levels, but one of the things I like about it best is that it handles the previous Rocky entries as realistically as possible and then grapples with the real world implications of what those events could have transpired.
In other words Apollo Creed's death in Rocky IV plays a tangible and compelling role in who Michael B. Jordan's titular character becomes.
Cobra Kai, in a weird way, has a similar structure. In this case, the first episode mostly drills down on the fallout from the fateful finale of the original Karate Kid film. For the uninitiated, nerdy hero Daniel LaRusso (played then and now by Macchio) triumphs over his arch nemesis Johnny Lawrence (Zabka). For fans of that film, it's a great heroic moment, but we come to learn that for Johnny that incident marked a bit of downward spiral into heavy drinking and inconsistent labor.
Meanwhile, LaRusso has matured into a bit of a local celebrity -- a smarmy car salesman who capitalizes on his notoriety as a karate hero to make appearances in cheesy ads. It helps that Macchio has not aged particularly well, he no longer has his boyish cuteness, so his performance comes across as believably insincere.
The show does a remarkable job of making Zabka -- who was a pretty atrocious and unlikable thug in the original film -- into a pretty sympathetic figure, and while the film has some fun with the fact that both its leads are has beens, it's not interested in making cheap jokes.
Instead, the show (which also makes great use of footage from the 1984 film for flashbacks) is actually a meditation on lost youth and those little moments that make seem inconsequential on paper but can alter your entire adolescence if they impact you to right/wrong way.
I wish more reboots took this kind of care and consideration with their material. So many attempts to update long dormant franchises try to do it in the laziest way possible -- either by making it 'darker' or by re-creating every beat from the original note for note. Neither approach works for me.
To be a truly successful, standalone and original project in your own right you need to do what HBO's Westworld has done masterfully to my mind. They took the essence of the 1973 film that inspired it -- the key elements of its premise -- but then built on them and added far more sophisticated and ambitious story elements than the movie could have ever taken on.
The original Karate Kid couldn't be bothered to give its villain to much back story or resolution either, but on this show there is an opportunity to make these archetypes actual people, and that will make everything that happens in the movies retroactively more interesting.
I have no idea how sustainable this series will be, but for now, it's proved a lot of doubters wrong and it's a lot more entertaining than it could have been because its creators clearly not only have affection for this material but feel like they have something new to say about it, which seems like a simple concept, but it's alluded a lot of producers of re-imagined reboots over the years.
Obviously, I still think we re-make, re-boot and re-visit too much these days, but if it has to happen for commerce reasons, creative reasons should be as close a second as possible.
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