Here’s the secret to enjoying it XO, Kitty, that of Netflix To all the boys I loved before spin-off show: the sooner you realize it’s actually a completely different ball game from the main To All the Boys movie, the sooner you’ll enjoy it.
The main trilogy of movies are coming-of-age romantic comedies, which had their own whimsical moments, but were mostly based on reality. XO, Kittyhowever, launches into teen drama territory entirely. Are Degrassi with a K-drama makeover. And somehow, despite all that, it’s still incredibly PG-13 too, with very chaste make-ups and no one keen on getting underage drinking. (In fact, the only time they do it becomes a enormous problem.)
High school TV shows are often more exaggerated than their cinematic counterparts, but this is a particularly interesting case study because there’s a direct movie comparison to be made. From the start, the plot is already a bit more complicated and over the top than the comparably straightforward To All the Boys films. Lara Jean’s younger sister Kitty (Anna Cathcart) decides she wants to reconnect with her long-distance boyfriend and also learn more about her Korean heritage, so she enrolls in an international school in Korea. The show wastes no time from her pitch to her dad to get her on a plane to Korea, brushing off any wait time because Kitty made an entire application without telling anyone in her family. Certainly!
Photo: Park Young-Sol/Netflix
Anyway, Kitty is in Korea and she finds out that her boyfriend is dating a wealthy socialite! Gasp! That would be dramatic in itself, but there is something out about that relationship hiding a bigger secret (and Kitty, with her superior matchmaking senses, discovers this via a live stream of a press conference). Kitty’s mother may also have a dark and stormy past, and Kitty, too, was accidentally put in the boys’ dormitories, and Kitty, too, could fail all her classes just like that.
It’s a lot, and if you’re still mentally comparing Kitty’s story to Lara Jean’s, it feels very shocking. Especially when it comes to the characters. Everyone in Lara Jean’s life acts more or less like a normal, if maybe a little dramatic, teenager. However, everyone in Kitty’s story – and even Kitty herself – is completely unhinged. There may be one character who acts like a normal, well-adjusted human being who has the best interests of his fellow humans at heart. Everyone else is often selfish, Machiavellian, and incapable of basic conversation.
Make no mistake – this isn’t a bad thing, especially when you realize it’s just a genre feature. How else are they supposed to have hilarious, over-the-top misunderstandings? Talk like reasonable people? Bah! Every plot points inward XO, Kitty is taken to the extreme. Every relationship is hyperbolic. Unlike other teen shows like Never have I ever, where the characters may react dramatically, but the drama itself is still quite grounded, XO, Kitty is a step away from a full-fledged soap opera, true to its K-drama roots.
Photo: Park Young-Sol/Netflix
Since everyone is a bad person, there isn’t a specific bad guy to hate on, so you end up liking them all, one way or another. Each episode ends with a hefty cliffhanger, so you should watch the next one right away. It goes to the extreme, and in that way it’s more tonally cohesive than the To All the Boys films, which switch to a more straightforward coming-of-age story after the first film’s rom-com hook is resolved .
A lesser show might try to ground some of the over-the-top elements, but XO, Kitty fully embraces every exaggeration of the genre and uses it to build a wild roller coaster of a high school show. When we add it all up like this, these aren’t mistakes, but instead are a ricocheting pleasure. It’s the kind of show that makes you scream at your screen when a character makes an utterly ridiculous choice, then immediately click “next episode” because you need to see where the hell this is going. Just be sure to hold and fasten your baseball caps like XO, Kitty launches at high speeds and never slows down.
XO, Kitty now streaming on Netflix.