Review of XO, Kitty’s first season

I will admit, I had no idea XO, Kitty was a thing until I saw all of the ads and trailer blasted on my social media.

I have a hunch I ended up with all of those targeted ads because I end up watching an unhealthy amount of Korean dramas, which this show attempts to emulate with some of the tropes and themes.

As a K-drama person there were moments I was cackling because I knew exactly what trope they were referring to (the hand grab as someone turns away? A classic.) that I knew someone like my sister, who only watches American television, wouldn’t get.

Anyways, once I realized this was set in Korea and was emulating said dramas, I ended up binge watching the entire show in one night.

It was really easy since the episodes are only about thirty minutes each, making the entire show about five hours. And man did I start hating it by the end, but I still watched all of it.

Here’s my review!

Kitty moves to Seoul, South Korea in search of love and her lost mother’s footsteps.

So at the beginning of the series, Kitty ends up landing a scholarship to attend her mother’s alma mater in South Korea, prestigious high school for international students.

Naturally, it’s full of rich kids, but she wants to go see Dae. Dae is the boy she met at the end of one of the To All the Boys I Loved Before movies at the top of Namsan Tower, and the two have been long distance dating.

But there’s a catch: Kitty doesn’t tell him about the scholarship and the fact she’s in Seoul. So when she turns up to the school, checks in, she finds out that he’s actually dating someone else: a rich student named Yuri.

But there’s a catch: Yuri is using Dae to hide from her parents. She’s gay and seeing another girl, who has been sent away once the two were discovered. Dae is only the school through financial aid, which falls through this year, and Yuri makes an agreement with him. If they act like a couple to fool her parents, she will pay for his tuition.

This naturally makes Kitty really upset, and she has a rough start to her new adventure abroad. She’s not going to let that stop her from figuring out her mother’s past and tracing her footsteps, even if it involves Dae or not.

The rest of the series is basically this awkward dance between her and Dae, especially when she’s accidentally put into a room with the boys, and how she helps her Australian teacher find out who his birth parents are.

There are some secrets (one of the teachers and the headmaster, who knew Kitty’s mom, ended up having the Australian teacher, creating even more friction) revealed throughout the process, and Yuri and Dae’s fake relationship ends up all over the media.

Some of the key moments that shine throughout the show are the friendships made in the process, even though I’d describe the entire show as awkward.

I will commend the use of culture and Korean in the show—the Korean dialogue was a lot better than expected, and that’s probably because they ended up usually actors fluent in Korean.

The other students who are the school that aren’t Korean seem very out of place for kids living in South Korea of all places, although the Miller daughter shows a penchant for K-pop and lowkey implies she’s there to learn about it.

As someone who studied abroad in South Korea during high school on a prestigious American scholarship, half the kids on that program had the same vibe as this girl at the beginning. Lots of people interested solely in going there for the music and idols.

But the actual characters and their stories just weren’t it for me. A lot of the dialogue ended up feeling really stiff and forced, like the actors were straight up in a television show rehearsing.

Not to diss them, but it just didn’t feel real to me. There were some moments that were really good, and the standout actor here was Anthony Keyvan, but I wasn’t impressed with how insulated everything felt.

I liked the implementation of K-pop in the transition scenes, but Kitty also doesn’t really experience Korea that much, nor do we even see her attempting to speak Korean once. Like girl this is a once in a lifetime opportunity to connect with your culture and you’re not actively throwing yourself into it?

It feels too American if that’s what I’m trying to say. And maybe I’m approaching this with a critical lens since I had an experience like this at the same age, in Seoul too, and while it’s set inside of a English-speaking private school, it feels very insular.

We get hints of the outside leaking in through the switches to Korean, the press and chaebol culture in South Korea, the fact the students are all reading Almond in the classroom (although translated). But in the end, it still feels like two different worlds. Some of the moments where it’s bridged are also when Dae goes home—that feels very Korean.

It’s an entertaining show. I watched all of it because of how digestible it was, but by the end I was ready for it to conclude. I see how they set it up for a cliffhanger at the end, setting it up for another season that I’ll probably watch because I have nothing else to do.

The LGBTQIA+ elements were a nice inclusion as well, but it felt like it was randomly throwing it in there when Kitty starts to have feelings for Yuri after lusting for Dae for so long.

Then it randomly turns into a love square with Min-ho?

Perhaps they tried to cram too much into the series for such a brief amount of episodes, I don’t know.

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