Cobra Kai
starring William "Billy" Zabka, Ralph Macchio, Mary Mouser, Courtney Henggeler, Xolo Maridueña, Nichole Brown, Tanner Buchanan, Jacob Bertrand and Gianni Decenzo
created by Josh Heald, Jon Hurwitz and Hayden Scholssberg (the Harold and Kumar films, American Reunion)
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When you raise kids, the only responsible question to ask is not "what do they want?" It's always "what do they need?" The first one sounds like the easiest way to go, but hopefully within a week you realize you can't spend every evening having Cap'n Crunch for dinner. At some point someone has to put their foot down and insist on a grown-up meal of chicken fingers and fries. But, you know, skin-on fries, for the roughage.
We're at the point where most of American entertainment is Gen X nostalgia, not even bothering anymore with recasted or reconceived reboots and just frankly starting things up again after years and years like nothing happened, British TV style. Will and Grace doesn't exactly have the cultural weight of Doctor Who, but the concept behind a decade-plus revival of both shows is exactly the same: finding ways to get more Megan Mullaly on screen. Doctor Who might have a lot more nerd cred, but it's been an absolute failure in that department. The occasional guest spots on Parks and Rec are fine, but it's not what western civilization needs to survive.
Treasure that she is, Megan Mullaly is indicative of both the appeal and the danger of these projects. Yes, the creative vacuity and crass cynicism of the mercenary Hollywood spirit behind these exhumations are both manifest and stark. In damn near every case, the meta-culture at large would be better served by an act of searching, striving, of stretching and birthing something heretofore unknown instead of shooting in zillion pixel 8K something we only remember seeing in a wavy analog square. But also in every case, we get to be startled about how, with the signal improved and sets freshly repainted, all the production cliches of a bygone filmic age that defy graceful aging stripped away, we get the sudden intake of breath as we're pleasantly surprised again that the people involved can fucking get it. It's not fair to try to judge the value of something like The Conners (née Roseanne) as a project when right in the middle of it you have not one but two generational talents disguised as supporting character actors in Laurie Metcalf and John Goodman. You'd watch those two (and Megan Mullaly) sit around and hum old commercial jingles to themselves for half an hour if it was on offer.
As a Judger Of Things, it gets confusing. Luckily there are opportunities for clarity. Everyone agrees Fuller House is bullshit.
But where does Cobra Kai fit? Is it fun to see William Zabka and Ralph Macchio together again? Sure. But it's not like the duo was so iconic that their proximity to one another alone is enough to justify the project. Bill and Ted Face the Music (which I have yet to see) this is not, in pedigree at least.
Both actors are game, and capable for sure. Their commitment to something so quintessentially inessential is itself endearing and does a lot of the work, as does the 25-or-so minute running time of each episode (originally a project of fledgling YouTube Red). The pacing is so snappy the whole thing almost snaps, but it holds together with a compelling commitment to making humans seem like humans (at least according to the rule-set the show establishes for human behavior right from the off), which is a nice way of saying pretty much everyone in this show is, to some degree, a total asshole.
It's listed in some places as a "comedy-drama," but beneath the frailty and failures of actual people, it really borders on pantomime. Because it's a show ostensibly about karate (a fighting system no one has taken seriously since 1993), there can't be tensions or disagreements that don't promise the inevitable roundhouse or leg sweep. For all the building of character and relationships, what you end up watching is a show about a bunch of people perpetrating a series of grievous felonies of increasing severity upon one another.
It's not a huge surprise then when it all culminates at the end of Season 2 with a set-piece of absurdist violence that runs like the last act of Macbeth as portrayed by about forty Power Rangers.
As I said, the commitment to try to portray complicated humans is the show's strength. Macchio's Daniel LaRusso is played as default decent, but also petty and angry and still triggerable recalling the trauma of the heightened violence of one period of his youth. Conversely, Zabka's Johnny is written as a dopey, jocky, grouch still fighting to un-scramble the fucked-up machismo programming he still isn't sure was all bad. His glimmers of reconsideration flash across his face as confusion the same way Daniel's darker instances vex him, usually dragged into light by his underused and sitcom-y wife, played by Courtney Henggeler, who is reduced to the frustrating, tropey position of disappointed scold.
For his part, I'm not always sure Zabka is up for the deeper emotional stuff, but all credit to him: he carries almost all of the comedy. It's usually in the same vein (middle aged frustration and man-out-of-time snark), but he delivers over and over.
There's a whole cast of next-generation characters, but see above: everyone in this show is an asshole. It would be great if they were given something lighter to do, but every scene ends with a scowling face-off, either punctuated by karate or threatening it. They've been given the unenviable task of carrying off all the pseudo-Shakespearean intrigue of secret families and shifting alliances that drown out the elements that the show excels at.*
Reviews usually work pretty hard to find the meta-point of the things they review, but this one wears its metatextual bona fides so prominently forward, they practically punch you in the face. It's a nostalgia trip about the traps and dangers of nostalgia, about the blurry space between memory and trauma and the dangers of being unable (or unwilling) to move on, by retreading a story first told in 1984. It's a story about delusion and self-delusion that are somehow so insistently, presently manifested, the difference between delusion and reality cease to have meaning.
I also like all the kicking.
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*Punching. Jokes. Jokes about punching.
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