It’s a bizarre quirk of Peak Content that the YouTube web series Cobra Kai exists in the first place.

The show arose out of a now-defunct effort to stock YouTube’s premium subscription service with original content—à la competitors Netflix and Amazon. The subscription service rebranded and then went extinct, but Cobra Kai remains—a sequel series to the 1984 film The Karate Kid, starring Ralph Macchio and William Zabka reprising their roles as rival fighters in California. It’s 35 years after high school; they’re deeply mired in dad feelings and long-held grudges.

YouTube’s huge audience skews young, so this series didn’t seem like an obvious fit. But Cobra Kai quickly became the most successful YouTube original to date, drawing 65 million views for its first episode; the premiere of the second season, which debuted in April, snagged 20 million views over the course of six days. A third-party firm found last May that Cobra Kai’s demand impressions significantly outperformed the second seasons of The Handmaid’s Tale and 13 Reasons Why.

At a moment where every streaming service has tried to repackage some existing story into a new spin-off, Cobra Kai also stood out as a particularly thoughtful sequel. The first season upended the dynamic of the film, putting Johnny Lawrence—the bully, played by Zabka—into the role of downtrodden outsider, while Danny LaRusso (Macchio) has become an established car salesman who gifts a bonsai to every customer. It’s a sensitive exploration of how the tables can turn: Danny’s daughter, a country club girl raised in a mansion, dates the class bully, while Johnny, former bully, ends up in the position of taking in and training the bullied.

Cobra Kai drew me into its torrid passion play of teenage aggression for two seasons, after the first ended with Johnny Lawrence’s new Cobra Kai soaring to victory—and Danny pledging to revive Miyagi’s practice of karate in a new dojo. The second season is less satisfying than the first, but the show still has a lot going for it—surprisingly dimensional characters, a broad landscape of multiple ethnicities and classes, and a bracing, almost cynical view of how young men solve their problems (often, the answer is violence!).

Cobra Kai is astonishingly faithful to the original movie; showrunners and creators Josh Heald, Jon Hurwitz, and Hayden Schlossberg tease details from Karate Kid into multi-episode arcs, whether that’s crane kicks or classic cars or the aforementioned bonsai schtick. But what it doesn’t have is Mr. Miyagi—the karate master who taught Danny to fight with honor, discipline, and mercy, played by comedian-turned-actor Pat Morita—the only commonality between all four original Karate Kid movies.

In a childish way, fueled mostly by 1994’s The Next Karate Kid—that’s the one where Hilary Swank plays the protégée—Mr. Miyagi always seemed to me like a kind of alternative hero, a spiritual man who had struggled with enlightenment and come out the other side carrying wisdom. Miyagi did violence, but he was not a violent man. In the films, his approach to karate was never popular in the way that Cobra Kai’s take-no-mercy aggression was. And he was, always, an outsider—a strange, off-putting, foreign-looking old man, who looked and acted nothing like the vision of American machismo that populated other films from the era—such as the two Arnold Schwarzenegger films that debuted the same year as The Karate Kid, Terminator* and Conan the Barbarian.