Cobra Kai season 5 was dropped on Netflix last Friday, and the series seems to have shattered all expectations with review scores seemingly exceeding what any of the Karate Kid spinoff’s previous seasons had accomplished.
Over the weekend, Cobra Kai managed to attain an impressive 100% critics' score on Rotten Tomatoes, as well as an even more commendable 95% score on the users’ side, which makes season five one of the series’ best so far. For now, Cobra Kai joins a few select TV series that hold multiple seasons worthy of a 100% critic rating, such as Breaking Bad, Mad Men, or Big Mouth, as the show’s debut season received the same unanimous praise back when it premiered on YouTube Red in 2018.
The list of shows possessing perfectly rated seasons on Rotten Tomatoes contains just over 100 different names, whereas in the movie section the number is closer to 400. Of course, the score is a fickle beast seeing as all Cobra Kai needs is one negative review to lose that milestone. Nevertheless, Cobra Kai season 5 has been doing just as good over on other review sites, as every new episode currently holds a rating of 8.1 stars or above on IMDb, including a 9.6 for Cobra Kai's hard-hitting finale.
Reviews for Cobra Kai have been mostly stellar, as season five sees Daniel LaRusso and Johnny Lawrence pair up with the Chozen, the former’s rival, in order to take down the evil Terry Silver. In season 5, Silver has really taken things to the next level as far as Karate Kid villains go. Most notably, in a day and age where review-bombing for video games, films, and TV shows can threaten any production’s online reputation, Cobra Kai has won the hearts of practically anyone who’s seen it, thus rendering it immune to internet trolls of any kind.
So what’s the magic behind Cobra Kai's most recent success? Well, to be fair, the show really isn’t doing anything it hadn’t done before in 2022, it’s just that this karate adventure has risen to the challenge of eclipsing itself by doubling down on everything that makes Cobra Kai so addictive in the first place. Not only that, fans are getting to see proper payoffs for most of the characters that Josh Heald and Jon Hurwitz have created to turn Johnny Lawrence into a modern hero.
Cobra Kai season 5 is currently available on Netflix.
Source: Rotten Tomatoes, IMDb