Indeed, one of the many changes streaming has brought to TV is the long waiting times in between seasons. We are now used to waiting at least a year, if not several years for new episodes of a show, often due to VFX, actors’ schedules, and the like.  Season 5 of Cobra Kai came out in September 2022, so it’s been a good while since last we saw these characters — though at least it’s not been as long as the wait between seasons of “Stranger Things.”

According to Hurwitz, the creative team used to write each 10-episode season in batches of five, splitting the season in half and dealing with the first five episodes before handling the latter five. Here’s how explained it to io9:

“This season, it was like, ‘Okay, well, three chunks of five would make sense.’ It’s almost like three acts in a bigger story. And that’s just something that we decided to do creatively. And when we talked about that with Netflix, they loved the idea of the three drops. And that’s where it came from. So we’ve known this for a very long time. And it is all by design.”

This is actually a pretty good idea, even if it feels like spreading the season too much. Plus, it’s nice to have confirmation that Part 3 is not a movie, or a single, longer episode — but five.

Part 1 arrives on Netflix beginning on July 18, 2024.