‘Cobra Kai’ Bosses Explain Final Season’s 3-Part Split & Challenge of Ending the Show

Schlossberg explained to TV Insider, “After Season 5, we knew that we were in endgame territory, and we were talking with Netflix about how many episodes really would be left. Usually, we do 10 episodes a season, but it wouldn’t be enough. If we did 20 episodes, it would be too much and probably take an extra year to make two seasons. We just felt that 15 was the right number. As soon as we came up with that in our minds, we thought, ‘five, five, five.'”

Season 6 Part 1 premieres Thursday with the first five episodes of the final season; Part 2 will follow on November 28, and Part 3 will arrive in 2025. Don’t expect the winning formula of the show’s narrative elements to change, though — there’ll just be a bit more this time around.

“With every season of Cobra Kai, we write five-episode character arcs. We have these mid-season finales where big things happen that set up for the back five. So it just naturally felt like the right thing to do,” Schlossberg said. “So we went to Netflix and said, ‘Okay, we’re gonna go with 15 episodes, it should go five, five, and five and have three drops.’ And we also just felt … it would be the best way to end the series, not all at once in one drop on one day, but a slow tease. You get a good amount of story and a good binge night, and we got more coming.”

The journey of Cobra Kai to this point, where it’s a true tentpole for Netflix, and that the creatives can make such major structural choices, is owed to the show’s massive popularity — first, as one of the first YouTube Original programs and then as a Netflix adoptee. According to Jon Hurwitz, where they’re at right now is what they wanted from the start.

“The irony of the whole thing is, what it’s become is kind of what our wildest dreams of what it was,” Hurwitz said. After seeing what the streamer pulled off with the retro vibes of Stranger Things and the revival era ushered in with Fuller House, the streamer seemed like a perfect fit: “We felt like we could take these characters from The Karate Kid, something that we loved so much, and that we felt was kind of as big as Star Wars in our minds to our generation… If we could just tell the story that we want to tell, and it’s on Netflix, then it’s gonna scratch an itch for a huge amount of people all over the world in a really big way,” Hurwitz remembered.

It was YouTube, though, that bit first with the project pitch, and even though others followed, they wouldn’t offer as much creative freedom: “Our very first pitch meeting was to YouTube Premium, and before we could even finish the pitch, they were just like, ‘Go make an entire season of the show. We’ll just let you do kind of whatever you want, and we’re going to support in a big way, and we’re going to go toe-to-toe with Netflix in general,” Hurwitz remembered. “It was a great experience making the show with the team over there, because they were supportive, and they believed in the vision that we had there. And we got to do interesting, surprising things.”

The execs at YouTube still had questions, of course: “I remember the first episode, we start with Johnny Lawrence, and you barely see Daniel LaRusso in that first episode. And that was something that the powers that be at YouTube, they were like, ‘Are you sure you want to do that or this?’ And we’re like, ‘Yes because Episode 2, that’s where you really get to know Daniel. But we want Daniel to be in the background, really put Johnny forward.'” But it was an asked-and-answered sort of situation, and the show launched with the lens its creators intended it to.

Coming into Season 6, which was announced to be the end of the Karate Kid spinoff in January 2023, the creators had a somewhat different approach to outlining the events than they had before, but they had a mission to keep the flow that fans had grown used to.

As Josh Heald explained, “We always end a season with a big cliffhanger, with a resolution of some stakes, and an intentional nonresolution of others, and we leave a lot of balls in the air. So, as with every season, you want to take those balls in the air and you want to land some of them, but usually you don’t want to land all of them… So what was different was knowing that we have to land all the balls in the air that we’ve been juggling intentionally, but also those landings have to not be just a bunch of successive ‘and then and then and then.’ They needed to come at a pace that made sense for the story, that matched the pace of the series.”

Heald added that while the creatives worked hard to resolve every dangling thread between the characters and plot points of the series, not everyone is necessarily going to have a happy ending.

“You can have something that is resolved and yet not fair, but it is intentional,” he explained. “We looked at every relationship, every storyline, every character, and wanted to make sure that we were intentionally steering all of these people that we care so much about toward their ultimate end game, while still telling 15 episodes that don’t feel mechanical.”

Cobra Kai, Season 6 Part 1 Premiere, July 18, Netflix

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