‘Cobra Kai’ Season 6 Part 1 Hits Netflix, Broken Into Three Parts, For Some Reason

Netflix is really starting to push its luck with its new philosophy of breaking seasons of its bigger shows in half, airing them a month or more apart. Originally, this was supposed to be due to production times, like how the last couple episodes of Stranger Things season 4 weren’t done yet. Now? They do it with almost anything remotely big in season 2 or later.

But why break things into two parts when you can break them into three parts? That’s what’s happening with Cobra Kai season 6, the final season which is now streaming on Netflix as of today.

But there are only five episodes, most of them being around half an hour or so. The triple split for this season means that Part 2 is airing on November 15 and Part 3 at some unspecified date in 2025. So it will take at least six months to air all three parts, if not closer to 8-9, depending on the finale dates. If it truly is a production issue, then delay the season to make it air together. Netflix has shown no interest in this whatsoever.

It’s even doing this with shows that barely make any sense, like splitting up That ‘90s Show into three chunks spanning from June to late October. And you can absolutely bet that when things like Wednesday season 2 or Squid Game season 2 arrive, they are going to be broken up into at least two parts as well. You are now lucky if you get them a month apart, in many instances.

This is the worst of both worlds for Netflix, more frustrating to watch than either a straight binge of a season, which was the entire philosophy of the service for eons, or just airing episodes weekly like many other services. At worst, some places do a hybrid of a 2-3 episode premiere and weekly ones to follow, which is fine.

But these batches of 3-5 episodes split across a month or six is bad and takes you out of the show. I also have to believe that showrunners are now being instructed to try to set up arcs that have specific break points to accommodate this, possibly changing the cadence of how they wanted to structure episodes before, making the shows themselves potentially worse.

It seems like the clear reason this is happening is in order for Netflix to get people to keep their memberships for longer by not bothering to cancel them when their favorite show returns for more episodes in a season a while later. But it’s really impacted the viewing experience when Netflix’s binge model was previously the most beloved in the streaming space.

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