Paul Tassi Senior Contributor Games News and opinion about video games, television, movies and the internet.
The Netflix effect is very real, and its latest acquisition has elevated the profile of a show that debuted in 2018, and made it the most popular series in the US right now.
That would be Cobra Kai, which started as a YouTube Red (now YouTube Premium) original series and ran for two seasons before YouTube realized that original shows weren’t exactly a priority for it, and Netflix recognized its potential.
Netflix didn’t just buy the streaming rights to the series, they bought the entire series, and are now branding it as a Netflix original on the service, and season 3 is coming under their banner in 2021.
Cobra Kai is a decades-later sequel to the Karate Kid movies, an extremely self-aware, clever series starring the original main cast members, William Zabka and Ralph Macchio, all grown up and retaining their fierce rivalry. The series is beloved by critics and fans alike, as it’s rocking a 94% on RottenTomatoes among critics and a 96% audience score there.
The show represents another example of Netflix taking an underwatched, extremely good series on another networks or service and acquiring it to instantly produce themselves their own hit. I’d say the most high profile example of this before this was You, the Lifetime series Netflix acquired, but I don’t think we ever saw You be the most watched show on the service like we’re seeing with Cobra Kai here. They also just did the same thing with Lucifer, which was the number one show before Cobra Kai showed up, acquired after its cancellation on FOX. Sometimes Netflix is able to do this with streaming rights alone, rather than purchasing a series outright, as we’ve seen with Riverdale, All American and Waco in the past.
Cobra Kai is short and easy to get through with just two, ten episode seasons right now where each installment is only around 30 minutes or so. We never got viewership numbers from YouTube Red when Cobra Kai was airing there, but it stands to reason they’ve increased by several orders of magnitude with the Netflix feature this week. We’ll see how long it stays on the top of the charts, as it still has to contend with Lucifer, Million Dollar Beach House and The Umbrella Academy further down. I’m not sure what’s out this coming weekend, but unless a show is a super, ultra megahit, we usually see week to week turnover in that slot.
Check it out, you won’t regret it.
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