EXCLUSIVE: YouTube Reports 5.4 Million First-Day Views for First Episode of ‘Cobra Kai’

Just when you think you have a handle on your preferred TV networks and streaming services, another one comes kicking and punching its way into your smartphone and connected TV.

Last year it was Hulu, which rode The Handmaid’s Tale‘s political currency and wrenching story all the way to the Emmy for Outstanding Drama. Next year will likely be Apple, with its billion-dollar slate of TV shows and its installed base of 1.8 billion devices for watching them.

This year, though, the new kid at the dojo is shaping up to be YouTube Red, which is available as a $10-a-month streaming service and as part of the $40-a-month YouTube TV service that competes more directly with satellite, cable and other streaming-bundle services. Cobra Kai, a witty and winning spinoff of The Karate Kid movies from the 1980s, launched Wednesday to critical praise, think pieces, morning TV, celebrity endorsements, reaction videos and (potential spoilers here) Season 2 speculation.

YouTube Red also has recent charm-fest Ryan Hansen Solves Crimes on Television (with Hansen and Handmaid’s co-star Samira Wiley) and Step Up spinoff series Step Up: High Water — both already renewed for second seasons — and Doug Liman’s big-budget action series Impulse coming this summer, but the main thing YouTube Red has going for it is YouTube.

“One of the reasons I wanted to come to YouTube was to be able to tap into the more than a billion worldwide daily users,” says YouTube original programming chief Susanne Daniels. “We know from research that there are millions of Karate Kid fans watching clips and uploading their own Karate Kid clips, so we’re marketing the show toward those millions of users.”

From the early returns, Cobra Kai looks like a hit.

YouTube made the first two episodes available free for non-subscribers midday on Wednesday, and YouTube reported to Decider that the first episode clocked 5.4 million views within the first 24 hours. That’s nearly double the reported 3.2 million Day 1 views last month for Netflix’s Lost in Space, which Nielsen said was Netflix’s most-watched show in its first week in release after Season 2 of Stranger Things.

A big start for Cobra Kai makes sense when you consider YouTube’s reach — 1.8 billion monthly worldwide users vs. 125 million subscribers for Netflix. Those won’t all translate into YouTube Red or YouTube TV subscribers, but YouTube having 14 times as many users as Netflix is an increasingly important metric in a media landscape that is becoming increasingly globalized.

Daniels sat down with Decider to talk about how YouTube got Cobra Kai, how the series is designed to appeal to different generations of viewers, and how good the prospects are for a second season. (Spoiler alert: They’re good.)

DECIDER: Cobra Kai is built on the foundation of a 1984 movie, but most of the actors in the series are post-millennials. Did you make the show to appeal to the parents or to the kids?

SUSANNE DANIELS: I would definitely say it’s for both. The show is designed to reach both, which I think you can see when you watch it. It’s got the throwback elements and Easter eggs for The Karate Kid lovers, and it’s got a younger generation with a younger point of view.

When you heard the original pitch for the series, how did it strike you as fitting into what YouTube is doing in originals?

I don’t think I knew that Ralph Macchio and Billy Zabka were coming to the pitch meeting, so that was a nice surprise, and they acted out a hilarious scene in the meeting. The pitch was so well-crafted, and the creators knew what they wanted to do with the series — even beyond the first season — and had this next generation built right into it. I offered them a series commitment in the room.

So Cobra Kai went straight to series — no pilot?

Straight to series.

Using an unlikeable — at least at the beginning — Billy Zabka character as the lead was an interesting choice that gave you a lot of places to go with him. I was a little surprised that the character is such an unrepentant drunk. Are you expecting to take some dings for that?

I would be surprised if we take any heat on that. It’s so organic to the character, and it’s not glorifying him being an alcoholic. He’s estranged from his son, his life’s not so great, and he’s not really making it. I have a problem with all kinds of things — sex, violence, language — when they’re not earned in the story. When it’s earned, that’s a different story.

There’s a scene of some of the kids drinking. You had the same approach with them?

I don’t think there’s a taboo subject. When I was overseeing programming at The WB network, we had sex, drugs, partying, drinking in shows with teens, and we took it seriously and treated it responsibly. It’s not a problem with kids if it starts a conversation about those things.

I see some similarities between Cobra Kai and Netflix’s Lost in Space. You’re trying to appeal to two very different generations of viewers as a family show, which — at least according to the Nielsen numbers — went extremely, extremely well for Lost in Space.

I’ve seen the first three episodes of Lost in Space and really enjoyed them, and I watched the show with my 8-year-old daughter. Cobra Kai is family viewing as well, and it’s interesting to me that people are looking for that. We used to get so many letters at The WB from parents talking about how they enjoyed watching 7th Heaven with their kids, and that ran for 11 seasons.

When I finished watching the series, I wrote in my notes that the last words in the last episode were: “The real story has only just begun.” That sounds like something you say when you know you’re getting another season.

[Laughs.] We haven’t renewed it yet, but I definitely want to renew it.

There have been at least two shows this year — Freeform’s Alone Together and Amazon’s Jack Ryan — that were renewed for a second season before they started airing the first season. Why do you think some networks are doing that?

It helps build a Season 1 if viewers know there will be a Season 2. There are a lot of choices out there, and viewers are wary of investing in a show that may be one season and out. Ordering a second season tells viewers that they can invest their time and energy in the series. We’ve already ordered second seasons for Ryan Hansen Solves Crimes on Television and Step Up: High Water.

You have Impulse coming up this summer, which is a big, expensive, action-oriented show based on the same books as the movie Jumper. How much will that be a sequel to the movie?

When I met with Doug Liman, who directed Jumper, he told that there were a lot more things he wanted to do with the idea of traveling through time and space. He had given so much thought to where we wanted to take Impulse, and he’s executive producing the series and directing some of the series.

One quirk I’ve noticed with new shows based on previous shows and movies is that the licensing doesn’t usually line up. ABC has the Roseanne revival but not the original episodes. Netflix has Fuller House but not Full House. YouTube Red doesn’t have The Karate Kid or Step Up or Jumper. Why has that been so difficult for networks and streamers to navigate?

In a perfect world, I would like to have had all of the Step Up movies when we launched the Step Up series, but we couldn’t get them. They were all licensed out, and we couldn’t get access to them. I had licensed the Step Up movies when I was at Lifetime and when I was at MTV, and they always performed really well. That was one of the reasons I wanted to make a Step Up series.

At least with Cobra Kai you had the rights to incorporate the film.

One of the coolest things about Cobra Kai is that the producers had access to the original film and the original dailies, and they used a lot of that in the series. There are shots from The Karate Kid in Cobra Kai that viewers will have never seen.

Scott Porch writes about the TV business for Decider, is a contributing writer for Playboy, and hosts a podcast about new digital content called Consumed with Scott Porch. You can follow him on Twitter @ScottPorch.