Cobra Kai's Netflix boost is a game-changer for the former YouTube series
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"Between its 2018 debut and last summer, Cobra Kai was barely a blip on the pop culture radar," says Miles Surrey of Season 3, which was released early on New Year's Day. "That is, until the series found a new streaming dojo: Netflix. The show made the move from YouTube—yes, YouTube was trying to compete in the scripted programming game; it went about as well as Quibi—to Netflix in August and benefited from the very tangible Netflix Bump that has helped pad the numbers for series as disparate as Breaking Bad, The Good Place, Riverdale, and You. Cobra Kai quickly became the platform’s no. 1 show over the summer, and considering the second season quietly premiered on YouTube’s paid subscription service in the middle of the great Avengers: Endgame and Game of Thrones Season 8 content avalanche of 2019, that rise is the kind of underdog story befitting the plucky franchise. It’s taken a couple of years, but Cobra Kai finally seems to have the right place to show off its moves. And with the third season’s release on Netflix the weekend after New Year’s, the new partnership is off to a great start." ALSO: How The Boys contributed to Cobra Kai's Season 3 surprise.
