XO, Kitty (2023) is a sweet expansion of the To All the Boys universe that manages to capture the often all-encompassing and multi-layered confusion of teenage matters of the heart, while still sometimes managing to strain, but never quite break, the limits of believability in other areas. Smartly, this series takes the characters outside the warm and nostalgic bubble of the well-worn rom-com format in which they’d been ensconced for the previous trilogy and plops them down in a more Soap Operatic structure. Or more accurately, a K-Drama-eratic structure, which is probably better for these storylines, which include a fake relationship meant to obfuscate a real one, a hotel magnate more concerned with his next deal than his teenage daughter’s feelings, a decades-old mystery, and the many, many mostly unrequited loves that criss-cross and cross-criss this series with appropriately dizzying speed. A note: If you haven’t yet dipped an eyelash into watching the To All the Boys movies you can still absolutely watch this series, but also, do you regularly avoid joyous things?
Kitty (Anna Cathcart), the youngest of the three Song Covey sisters, considers herself a skilled matchmaker. She was the one, after all, who knew that Lara Jean (Lana Condor) and Peter Kravinsky (Noah Centineo), who launched the franchise of a thousand sighs, were destined for one another. Her own romantic life, however, has been a bit stalled in a long-distance relationship of poor video calls and time zone shuffles ever since she met Dae (Minyeong Choi) almost four years ago on family vacation to Korea. (You can see their meet-cute in To All the Boys: Always and Forever, but be forewarned that there has been a Dae swap since then.) Ready to close the distance between them and finally kiss the virgin sheen off her lips (not a euphemism), Kitty secretly applies to the Korean International School of Seoul (KISS), where Dae is a student and where Kitty’s beloved mother also spent her junior year of high school. Yes, Kitty is most certainly focused on the boy, but she also desperately wants to connect with her mother, who died before Kitty was really old enough to form lasting memories of her. Of course, Kitty is accepted to KISS with a full scholarship, so all that’s left to do is convince her father (John Corbett) and stepmother Trina (Sarayu Blue) to let her go. This is also the first place the series strains credulity because can you really apply to and be accepted to an entire international school and scholarship program without your non-estranged and financially liable parents being notified? Doubtful. But it does make for a cute scene where Kitty makes a PowerPoint presentation about why she should be allowed to go and then her father ponders whether he just gave his teenage daughter permission to go to Korea to have sex with her boyfriend. So we’ll kind of let it slide.
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In the airport, Kitty has a run-in with an attractive but very snobby guy who will absolutely be vital to the plot down line and is my friend and editorial advisor’s preferred Genetically Blessed Face. She also emails her sisters Margot and Lara Jean. I’m sorry, do you need me to say that again? She EMAILS HER SISTERS. No, there is no time travel involved. Why would a teenager email her sisters from the airport instead of texting them like the smartphone hamsters intended? I’m pretty sure it was so that the XO, Kitty title could be established early on. I mean, which is worse, emailing her sisters or signing her texts? That’s rhetorical, obviously.
Later, she arrives in Korea with one mid-sized suitcase and school-sized backpack for AN ENTIRE YEAR OF SCHOOL, so she’s either got some serious packing skills or this is some serious poetic license. After missing the bus from the airport to KISS, she attempts to get there via public transportation, which appears to be going not that well until she gets hit by a car while crossing the street. She’s unharmed and, when the chauffeur (Lee Sung-wook) and the girl inside the car jump out to ask Kitty if she’s okay, she immediately asks for a ride to KISS. I mean, points for chutzpah, but I also feel like if this were a different kind of show Kitty would be the first to die? It turns out the girl, Yuri (Gia Kim), is also a student at KISS. What are the chances? And, because Kitty, delightfully, has zero filter and zero qualms about asking personal questions, we get all the details on how Kitty plans to surprise Dae at the Welcome Party that night. That’s right. He has no idea that she’s even in Korea, let alone about to attend the same school. You know this can only end badly. Yuri, on the other hand, cagily offers that she’s been seeing someone this summer, but that it’s “not serious” because “it’s complicated.”
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Meanwhile, Dae is in danger of getting kicked out of school entirely if he can’t come up with the tuition he owes, because he’s not as wealthy as he made himself out to be to Kitty. In fact, he attends KISS on a partial academic scholarship and his father is the driver for Yuri’s family, who own a string of international luxury hotels. Yuri’s mother, on the other hand, is the principal of KISS, which is very cozy for everyone, since the daughter of the hotelier her husband is trying to woo will be attending the school this year. Plus, Yuri was seen by a housekeeper sharing a too intimate embrace with her friend Juliana (Regan Aliyah), which her parents fear will reflect badly on the entire family since homosexuality isn’t always as accepted in Korea. To cover her tracks, Yuri has to come up with a fake hetero relationship, and fast. And who better to fit the bill than her chauffeur’s son? He’s desperate for cash to pay his tuition, so he can easily bribe him into it, her parents most certainly won’t approve, so the relationship is doomed to fail, and as far as she knows he doesn’t have a girlfriend hanging around anywhere! You see where this is going, right? Oh, the twisted webs we weave!
Now, just to complicate things a smidge more, and rile me more than a bit, Kitty is accidentally assigned to the boys’ dormitory, thus isolating her entirely from any real chance at having deep and meaningful friendships with any girls during this series. Not only that, but of course she ends up living in a suite with Dae and his best friends Min Ho (Sang Heon Lee), the self-centered guy from the airport and Q (Anthony Keyvan), a gentle Peter Kravinsky-type who is into boys and becomes Kitty’s closest confidant. Look, I get why they give her the New Girl treatment from a plotting point of view, but I squirm when I see these kinds of shows depicting teenage girls without any girlfriend in sight. Kitty doesn’t even really contact her sisters throughout the series, and almost every person she turns to for advice and solace is male. I’m not saying that cross-gender relationships can’t be formative, important, and supportive. But we’ve spent decades (more, really) in the trenches of misogyny watching girls be pitted against girls, girls be pitched as “different” than other girls, or, in this case, girls just existing almost outside the orbit of other girls or love interests, and I just think it’s so important to see teenage girls as part of a supportive, messy, thriving, growing, changing, community of other girls. I feel like Kitty’s character is missing out on something by largely being surrounded by possible love interests, boys, and men on all sides. Also, are there never room checks in this school? It seems like a pretty strict school and you’re telling me they just let these kids live their lives behind entirely closed doors? No questions asked? I’m suspicious.
Anyway, Kitty surprises Dae at the Welcome Party, but it’s Kitty who is in for the almost bigger surprise because that’s also when Dae and Yuri debut their fake relationship to the masses, which, of course, Kitty doesn’t know is fake, though she has her suspicions because she’s no stranger to this kind of set up. The night is an all out disaster. Dae is crushed that he can’t be with Kitty. Kitty is crushed that Dae is cheating on her with Yuri and she knocks over a whole tower of cupcakes in front of all her new peers and she earns herself the nickname “the Portland Stalker.” Plus, she has to put up with Min Ho’s constant needling and mean comments about her appearance and everything. And we all know what it means when a boy strongly dislikes his best friend’s girlfriend in this exact way, right? Yuri is crushed because her texts to Juliana go unanswered and eventually undelivered, plus her plan that her parents will force her to immediately break up with Dae seems to backfiring as they actually want her to stay with him for the image it conveys.
Kitty decides to throw in the towel, pack up her teeny tiny suitcase, and leave after that first awful night, but then she stumbles across a bunch of places on campus that correlate to photos in the album her mother left behind and the pull to be immersed in the same place as her mother is too strong. She stays, of course, stumbling upon a mystery from her mother’s time there that will eventually pull in many of the adults at the school.
Now, a lot of time is going to spent on the will-they won’t-they of Dae and Kitty as they navigate the waters of the him seemingly being with Yuri and really having lied to her, but what the series does well is leave space for Kitty to gradually explore the unexpected feelings that arise for someone else in the interim. She has spent the last several years myopically focused on her relationship with Dae and her feelings for him, leaving herself no room to even conceive of that possibility. The series handles her and other characters’ confusion about their emerging romantic and sexual feelings sincerely and I think, in this case, the fact that their sexual exploits are entirely chaste lends it an extra layer of sincerity. This is a show that concerns itself largely with questions of honesty, integrity, and being on the same page with your romantic or sexual partner, which are all pretty good messages to value in a relationship. But it’s also very open about these young people not having it all figured out in terms of where they may fall on the spectrum of sexuality, on wanting an actual relationship versus just hooking up, on who they like, or on feelings being reciprocated. None of it is done flawlessly, but it’s all done well enough for me to really appreciate what they’re conveying, and I think it’s what made me feel most connected to the show and the characters.
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Still, there’s a LOT going on and we haven’t even really touched on the adults yet. Though I’ve got to be up front here and say that the adult characters are largely written so flatly that I wondered if they had accidentally been smooshed by anvil a la Wile E. Coyote. On her first night in Korea, Kitty meets Alex Finnerty (Peter Thurnwald), a Korean-Australian teacher, who is also new to KISS. Alex is supposed to be young and inexperienced at teaching, but holy bananas the way they have him interact with Kitty is so wholly uncomfortable that I wanted to stage an intervention. Boundaries! I may have shouted at my screen more than once. Boundaries, Alex! He just chats to her like they are almost peers, instead of him being a teacher whom she barely knows. Also, Alex’s worldly advice to Kitty mostly consists of telling her that she’ll “be okay.” And he’s not alone in that. Kitty’s father also consoles her by saying that she’s strong and that confusion is part of growing up, which isn’t untrue, but both pieces of advice are so entirely useless that I want to scream in their faces in frustration. Especially the “you’ll be okay.” How the fuck would you know, Alex? You got a crystal ball somewhere? Sorry. Alex is a perfectly fine person. He is also my other friend and editorial advisor’s preferred Genetically Blessed Face, so I will cast no further aspersions his way, except to say that his advice sucks and if he’s going to keep teaching he really needs to get someone else to write his conversations with students. Alex’s foil is the more seasoned Professor Lee (Michael K. Lee), who basically tells Kitty that her garbage American education isn’t worth a damn in Korea and doesn’t show any signs of ever having known joy in his lifetime. He’s a peach. Principal Han (Yunjin Kim) first pretends to have no recollection of Kitty’s mother and then downplays their friendship, even though Kitty has photos of them together when they were in school. The plot thickens! She also barely listens to her daughter and is mostly invested in promoting a positive image to the outside world, even if their family is crumbling on the inside. Mr. Han (Hyongchol Lee, also listed as Hyeong-cheol Lee) is basically just a ball of rage and greed with absolutely no depth. (He’s still my preferred Genetically Blessed Face. Catch him when he’s not spewing assholery and you can totally see it.) The problem, for me, with all these adults is not so much their storylines, which are juicy enough for a series like this, but the fact that they are so one-sided and flat for much of the show that their eventual transformations feel jarring and unearned.
Because I am nothing if not utterly dedicated to making sure you are fully informed, the photo below shows what Mr. Han under more flattering circumstances.
For the most part, this isn’t true when it comes to the teenagers. It’s certainly not true when it comes to Kitty who is divinely self-centered, open-hearted, and thoughtful, like any teenager worth her salt. She drives Q to the brink with her constant perseverating about Dae and the decades-old mystery about her mother, but she also helps him to find a boyfriend, thoughtfully meddles in other people’s lives, and brings people together. You know, when she’s not epically messing things up again and again. The point is that she has layers. As do most of the other characters as the series progresses. (The first couple of episodes are the most Kitty-centric.) Though, I will say that it felt like Dae didn’t have enough grit or interest, so everything seemed to just slip off him like water off an umbrella, or like I imagine free radicals would off his ageless skin. By the end I had more opinions about his sister and father, who only appeared in a couple of scenes, than I did him.
At this point I’m not even sure this review would fit inside Kitty’s suitcase, but what I’m trying to say is that, while this series has its flaws, I’m willing to overlook a lot of them for the way it so deftly expresses the wild and heady feelings and bewilderment of teenage yearning, confusion, relationships, and love.
Overall Rating on the Chronically Streaming Pain Scale:
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Category: WHY
