Stream It Or Skip It: ‘XO, Kitty’ On Netflix, A ‘To All The Boys’ Spinoff Where The Youngest Covey Sister Goes To School In Korea

The 2018 Netflix film To All The Boys I Loved Before was an unexpected hit because it was not only a smart teen romcom, but it featured an Asian-American lead, something that we hadn’t seen a lot of to that point. It spawned two other movies featuring the Covey sisters, and now the youngest, matchmaker Kitty, has a series of her own.

XO, KITTY: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: Floating in the middle of a pool during a party, Kitty Song Covey (Anna Cathcart) tries to FaceTime with her boyfriend Dae (Minyeong Choi), who lives in South Korea. The signal is awful.

The Gist: Despite being super-long-distance, the relationship Kitty has with Dae has been good since they met a few years ago. She’s a matchmaker, after all, and she “feels” the same feeling for her and Dae that she had for her older sister Lara Jean (Lana Condor) and Peter (Noah Centineo), and for her father Dan (John Corbett) and her stepmother Trina Rothschild (Sarayu Blue). So when she gets a call from the Korean International School of Seoul (KISS), telling her that her application has been approved and she can start the new school year at the same school Dae goes to, she lobbies her father hard to go.

Her reasoning isn’t just about a boy, though; she wants to go to the same school her late mother went to and find out more about her mom’s life and her Korean roots. So, after a very convincing video presentation, Dan agrees to it, despite the fact that Kitty’s only going into her junior year in high school.

Her plan is to surprise Dae during the school’s welcome party. After missing the shuttle bus from the airport to the school, Kitty finds herself wandering Seoul, but almost gets run over by the driver for Yuri Han (Gia Kim), the daughter of the country’s most prominent families in the hotel business; she’s a well-known socialite who gets followed by paparazzi. Yuri gives her a ride; she goes to KISS, too, and can’t wait to see the boy she’s been dating all summer, as well.

Yuri is also the daughter of the head of the school, Jina Lim (Yunjin Kim); she’s concerned that Yuri has been sneaking around all summer with a girl named Juliana (Regan Aliyah), which will look bad for the Han Hotels’ merger with an American hospitality group. Yuri tells her mother that she’s been dating a guy that the family wouldn’t approve of.

After an accidental jetlag-induced nap, Kitty wakes up, gets ready and goes to the party. She finally sees Dae, but is horrified when Yuri takes his arm and declares that he’s her boyfriend.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? XO, Kitty is a spinoff of Jenny Han’s To All The Boys movie trilogy, but it does a good job of standing on its own for people who didn’t see the films. As far as its romcom feel, it is more reminiscent of Never Have I Ever.

Our Take: Han and Sascha Rothchild are the showrunners of XO, Kitty, and it has the same light feel as the trilogy it’s spun off from. And while Kitty was a little kid when the film series started, Cathcart has grown up along with her character, and making her the center of this series was a well-thought out move, as was centering the series in Korea instead of at home.

During the first two episodes, we were thoroughly engaged with Kitty and the lengths she wants to go to in order to be together with Dae; it helps that Cathcart has such a goofy, charming presence. She plays Kitty as someone who can hold her own in just about any situation, including being lost in a huge city like Seoul. That’s helpful, because Han and Rothchild have Kitty go through a hell of a lot in those first two episodes.

The machinations that keep Kitty and Dae apart in the first two episodes start to spiral into romcom silliness at a certain point: There’s a fake relationship involved, a viral video of Yuri’s dad berating staff in one of his hotels, a scholarship, and Dae’s trouble paying his tuition. He gets in deeper and deeper as those episodes go along, and paired with Kitty’s refusal to talk to him, it was starting to feel like the ways the two of them are going to stay apart were going to feel increasingly artificial.

Then something happens at the end of episode 2 that put our faith back in this story. Kitty sees something that confirms to her that Dae isn’t a cheater. So she won’t be spending the entire first season in a haze of misunderstandings. There may be times when things with Dae will be put aside in favor of Kitty finding out more about her mom — her mom and Jina were apparently friends back in the day but Jina denied knowing her when Kitty asks, for instance — forming new friendships and generally just getting used to being so far away from home.

We see enough secondary characters in the first two episodes — Dae’s buddies Min Ho (Sang Heon Lee) and Q (Anthony Keyvan), friendly Aussie instructor Professor Lee (Michael K. Lee), and overachieving American hotel family scion Madison (Jocelyn Shelfo) — to know that there will be opportunities for more stories as the season (and, hopefully, seasons) go along. Han and Rothchild have set up a show with layered stories that give XO, Kitty potential to last a few seasons and not just be tied down by the whole Kitty-Dae romance.

Sex and Skin: Nothing. It’s all very innocent in the first two episodes.

Parting Shot: Kitty dashes out of the welcome party after seeing Dae and Yuri together.

Sleeper Star: Sang Heon Lee is funny as the conceited Min Ho, who constantly thinks that Kitty is hitting on him when she is pretty much repulsed by how arrogant he is.

Most Pilot-y Line: Listen, we don’t know the neighborhoods in Seoul, but when Yuri gives Kitty the ride to KISS, it feels like it’s miles away from where they encountered each other. It makes us wonder why she just didn’t call an Uber from the airport (of course, that would have killed that part of the plot, but we tend to be curmudgeons about these kinds of things).

Our Call: STREAM IT. XO, Kitty works because Cathcart knows Kitty very well at this point, the story takes turns that aren’t the usual artificial romcom plot contrivances, and there’s enough layers to make the show more than just about its central romance.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.