Cobra Kai is the best TV show of the year

For a month or two I saw snippets of advertisements for what appeared to be some kind of Karate Kid continuation story. I have to admit that I was never a big Karate Kid fan.

I’m pretty sure that I watched it when I was a kid, but even that memory is hazy and I don’t have a clear recollection of ever having watched it in its entirety.

Because of this I was hesitant to even want to learn more about Cobra Kai, much less watch it. But after hearing nothing but positive reviews for it by trusted sources, I decided that I would give it a try.

I can now safely say that Cobra Kai is by far my new favorite show. That sounds kind of weird to say, but it’s true. Cobra Kai possesses a twisted kind of genius that we don’t see very often these days.

This Karate Kid quasi-sequel stood out to me in a big way because of the way it tackled the dual nature of its characters. I hesitate to say “heroes” or “villains” because unlike so many stories we currently enjoy or grew up with, the characters in Cobra Kai just aren’t simple enough to be labled as protagonists or antagonists.

At any given point, the main characters in Cobra Kai are a weird blend of both.

The characterization scale fluctuates very rapidly in this story leaving you with the weird sense of wanting to root for every single character, even though they’re always coming into constant conflict with one another.

Take the main character, Jonny Lawrence, for instance. By all accounts, Jonny isn’t really a great guy. He’s a bully, he’s mean, he’s crass…and he’s completely awesome!

You can’t really defend Jonny though. His abysmal circumstances are a byproduct of his life choices. He’s not dumb, he’s simply resentful and clings to the past with an unhealthy deathgrip.

But on top of all of that, you can’t help but like the guy. For as immature and mean-spirited as he is, he’s a fairly normal person who wants to do the right thing, but has just forgotten how to do it somehow.

One of the cool things about the writing of Cobra Kai is how it introduces its characters. It does an amazing job of giving you first impressions of certain characters, leaving you with the innate desire to like or dislike that particular person.

But before you can do either for too long, the writers brilliantly pull the rug out from under you and introduce a new side to the character’s personality which gives them an unusual level of nuance and depth.

The genius of this writing style is that the character’s personalities don’t transform from one thing to another on a dime, it simply show you different sides of these individuals that were already there.

The best example of this is when the Karate Kid himself, Daniel LaRusso, is introduced for the first time. After being teased during the pilot with tv commercials and billboard advertisements, we finally get to see the Daniel LaRusso come face to face with his teenage rival, the down on his luck Jonny Lawrence.

When we finally meet Larusso, he comes off as a pompous prick who is only interested in showing off to his employees at his very successful car dealership.

For a minute, Cobra Kai manages to make us hate Daniel LaRusso.

But just as our anger begins to boil, the coin flips and we instantly see the good, genuine side of LaRusso start to bleed through. When LaRusso realizes that that it would cost more for his former rival to repair his precious Firebird than what the vehicle is worth, he instantly offers to repair the car for free with the excuse that his technicians could use the practice working on such an old car.

In that moment, we both hate and love the former Karate Kid.

This type of duality happens throughout the Cobra Kai series. People we thought were protagonists turn out to be antagonists and vice versa. Characters we thought were one-dimensional turn out to be nuanced and three-dimensional human beings with faults, aspirations, dark sides, and good intentions.

In real life, we humans fall somewhere in the realm of Cognitive and Social psychology. We act out based on genetic as well as social and environmental factors, just to name a few.

No human being is wholly one thing or another. We are neither completely good nor evil.

To deny that each of us has an evil, dark side would be straight up denial. Just because we may develop into a respectable human being doesn’t mean that our evil side just goes away. It can merely only become more and more dormant, much like how an alcoholic can’t truly be cured of alcoholism.

As the characters in Cobra Kai demonstrate so applicably, there is a duality to mankind.

But that is exactly what makes humanity so fascinating. A hero isn’t interesting if they don’t have a dark side to overcome, and a villain who was born a natural antagonist is merely a boring caricature.

Daniel LaRusso and Jonny Lawrence are both jerks. They’re simultaneously heroic and self-sacrificing in their own ways.

Cobra Kai is one of the best character pieces I’ve seen in a good long while, which sounds ridiculous to say because, after all, it’s an overdue sequel to Karate Kid of all things.

Maybe that’s part of what makes it so special.