For most of XO, Kitty‘s first season, Katherine Song Covey (Anna Cathcart) — “Kitty” to her friends — and Yuri Han (Gia Kim) have been sworn enemies. Their animosity is understandable: Kitty has travelled thousands of miles to attend the Korean Independent School of Seoul (KISS) and to reunite with her longtime, long-distance boyfriend, Dae, only to discover that Yuri and Dae are in a relationship or so she’s led to believe. But about midway through the season, something shifts…the tension between eases and, suddenly, Kitty looks at Yuri with new eyes.
“She’s amazing,” Kitty confesses to herself. As she watches Yuri deejay her roommate’s party, Kitty looks like the heart eyes emoji come to life. The feelings coursing through her body are electric and when Dae comes over, trying desperately to explain the situation, Kitty admits that she gets it now. She can’t blame him for loving Yuri because she’s fallen a little bit in love with Yuri too. At the moment when Kitty’s crush starts to foment, she doesn’t know that Yuri’s relationship with Dae is just a ruse to keep the truth of Yuri’s sexuality — she’s gay — and her girlfriend, Juliana (Regan Aliyah), hidden from her parents. Kitty doesn’t know any of that but later that night, she has a “sex dream” about her enemy turned wanna-be lover.
Television rarely surprises me anymore. Years of relying on subtext for representation have turned me into a skilled storyline sleuth but the queering of Katherine Song Covey was something I didn’t see coming. I’d been lulled into a false sense of understanding by the heavily boy-centric narrative of the To All The Boys I’ve Loved Before trilogy — which center Kitty’s older sister, Lara Jean (Lana Condor) — and the start of this series. XO, Kitty‘s queer storylines, with Yuri and Juliana and Quincy/Q and Florian, were just nice side dishes to go along with the show’s heterosexual main, I thought. I never expected it to take center stage.
XO, Kitty‘s first season plot twist was so refreshing and so well done it finished as one of my favorite storylines of 2023. That said, I approached season two of XO, Kitty with some trepidation: the show had exceeded my non-existent expectations in its inaugural run but how would the show fare under the weight of expectations? It’s a mixed bag.
XO, Kitty‘s second season picks up one month after its first. Kitty returns to KISS following winter break with a new outlook, pledging to focus more on her classes and improving her Korean. She’s also committed to doing the thing that prompted her to come to Korea in the first place: learning more about the mother she never knew who’d been a student at KISS in the early 90s. Kitty’s return to KISS wasn’t a foregone conclusion: at the end of last semester, she was expelled for living in the boys’ dorm, a violation of her scholarship’s conduct policy. Thankfully, though, Yuri intercedes on Kitty’s behalf, convincing her mother — who was the school’s principal — to give Kitty another chance.
One thing about Kitty Song Covey hasn’t changed, though: she’s as open to love — from boys or girls — as she’s ever been, only this time, she wants to avoid all the drama. She vows to keep her romantic entanglements out of her dorm room — she opts for a single room — and outside their friendship group. Q’s skeptical that Kitty 2.0 has been able to move on from Yuri so quickly but she insists that she said goodbye to her feelings for Yuri in a letter that she’ll never send, just as her sister Lara Jean used to do. Of course, in To All The Boys, Lara Jean’s letters got out — it was Kitty who sent them to her sister’s past loves, in fact — so the specter of Kitty’s letter hangs over the second season.
But despite her best efforts to convince Q that she’s moved on from Yuri, the moment the two reconnect, it’s obvious that Kitty is still in love. Oblivious to Kitty’s feelings, Yuri announces that they’ll be living together this semester and — surprise! — Juliana will be living with them. Kitty feigns excitement but, inside, she’s mortified by the thought of having to be around Yuri and her girlfriend for an entire semester. The development forces Kitty to acknowledge the obvious: she’s not over Yuri, not even close.
On a lot of other shows, the love triangle — or love pentagon, if you’re including Dae and Min Ho, both of whom return to KISS still carrying a torch for Kitty — would lead to the show devolving into chaos. And, certainly, there is some of that, particularly as Kitty volleys from one prospective love interest to another, but the show doesn’t wallow in the chaos. XO, Kitty is a saccharine sweet show, sometimes cloyingly so. Problems arise from misinterpretations and misunderstandings but, for the most part, there’s no malice there. Everyone within this chosen family genuinely cares about each other and studiously avoids trying to hurt anyone else.
To that end, Kitty doesn’t use the close confines to draw closer to Yuri, in hopes of splitting her and Julianna up. Instead, she tries to keep her distance, yielding the space that she used to occupy by Yuri’s side to her girlfriend. Even when Kitty wants to reach out to comfort Yuri — still smarting from her parents’ divorce or their hurtful responses to her coming out — she resists, worried about how it’ll be interpreted and if it’ll only deepen the feelings she has for Yuri.
True to her word, Kitty ventures outside the friend group to find a new love interest. She meets Praveena (Sasha Bashin) at the semester’s opening assembly and the two develop an easy rapport. Kitty jumps at the opportunity to go out with Praveena but every one of their dates is upended by Kitty’s connection to someone else. While I appreciated the show’s attempt to show that Kitty’s bisexuality, which she embraces wholeheartedly in the first episode, extends beyond Yuri, there’s not enough time afforded to building out their relationship that there ever feels like Praveena has a shot at winning Kitty’s heart. It certainly doesn’t help that this season of XO, Kitty features two fewer episodes.
Likewise, there’s not enough time spent with Yuri this season. I wish she’d been given space to react to her encounters with Kitty, particularly after the letter’s contents become public, but we’re barely afforded any time with her, outside the confines of her relationship with Juliana. Where is the lesbian processing? We’re repeatedly told about Yuri’s problems with her parents but this season we don’t get to see her interact with either of them. Last season, Yuri built a solid friendship with Dae and forged a connection with her newly discovered half-brother, Alex, but neither of them are given the opportunity to be the confidante that Yuri so desperately needs.
What’s particularly frustrating about this season of XO, Kitty is that it devotes too much screen time to Min Ho’s dad, a mega-rich talent manager — “the Kris Jenner of Korea” — who brings his money and his reality show to KISS. It felt like an attempt to inject more K-Pop energy into the show which I don’t think it needed. I’d have much preferred spending more time with Kitty’s long-lost Korean family and the familial history of matchmakers. The biggest misgiving I have about the storyline, though, is that it introduces XO, Kitty‘s first villain — a character truly acting out of malice — onto the canvas. The tone of it all just feels horribly discordant with the rest of the show.
Despite my misgivings about XO, Kitty‘s second season, I still recommend it. I continue to find Anna Cathcart’s portrayal of Kitty Song Covey every bit as endearing as when she was first introduced in 2018. I’ll always wish for more — I hold out hope that Yuri is Kitty’s Peter Kavinsky — but I appreciate the show for what it does offer.
“I feel like these characters just don’t exist in the world of Korean-based stories that I’ve seen so far,” Gia Kim (“Yuri”) noted in a recent interview. “Whether that’s Korean dramas or movies. These characters don’t really come to screen that often with Korea as a backdrop, especially with the queer story love line.”
I understand the impulse to compare XO, Kitty to other teen/high school-based shows and find it lacking. There’s not nearly enough scandal and intrigue; it’s all just so nice. But perhaps the fairer option is to compare XO, Kitty to other K-dramas. By that measure, particularly when it comes to queer representation, XO, Kitty is breaking new ground and, hopefully, pushing an entire genre towards greater inclusivity.
XO, Kitty season two is now streaming on Netflix.
