Cobra Kai

Essential, and the single best thing anyone has made from this material. The premise sounds like a joke and is executed seriously: thirty-four years on, the blond bully from the 1984 tournament is a broke, divorced handyman living in a flat with a broken television, and the boy he lost to owns a chain of car dealerships and has never quite stopped bringing it up.

The move that makes the whole series work is refusing to pick a side. Johnny is funny, unreconstructed, frequently appalling and completely sincere about wanting to help the kids who end up in his dojo. Daniel is decent, self-righteous and much less willing to examine himself than he thinks. Each season hands the moral high ground back and forth, and the show is at its best when it quietly demonstrates that the 1984 film was being told to you by one of two unreliable parties.

It began on a subscription service nobody used, moved to Netflix for its third season and found an enormous audience there, and ran six seasons before ending in 2025. The tone is a deliberate tightrope: it is a comedy about middle-aged men who have not grown up, and also a sincere teen drama where the fights have consequences, and the fact that it mostly holds both is the achievement. The sixth season is the baggiest and the fourth and fifth are the strongest.

It also rewards the films in a way no other legacy sequel has managed, treating Part III and the Okinawa material as real history worth building on. Watch the first two films at minimum before starting it. The third helps more than you would expect.