XO, Kitty - The Most Chaotic Netflix Teen Show, of Which I’ve Watched Every Single Second

Three seasons of absolute nonsense, and somehow I have no regrets

I need you to understand the journey I’ve been on. XO Kitty, a spin-off of To All The Boys I’ve Loved Before, follows Lara Jean’s younger sister Kitty as she moves to Seoul for a boarding school called KISS to surprise her long-distance boyfriend and connect with her late mother’s Korean roots.

That premise sounds wholesome enough. What actually happens across three seasons is Kitty cheating on multiple people, blowing up everyone’s relationships, nearly getting expelled, coming back anyway, and somehow still having a friend group willing to go on ski trips with her.

TMJ Rating: 🍿🍿🍿/5

What Is This Show Even About

Season one drops Kitty in Seoul, where she discovers her boyfriend Day is fake-dating the rich popular girl Yuri to cover up Yuri’s actual relationship with her girlfriend.

Kitty ends up rooming with Day and his friends through an administrative error, falls for Yuri mid-season in a plot twist the trailers did not warn anyone about, gets expelled for failing all her classes, and leaves with Minho confessing his love to her on the plane home.

Then season two brings her back, introduces a psychotic revenge-plotting roommate named Stella, blows up four separate relationships in one ski trip episode, and ends with Kitty realising she has feelings for Minho after spending the whole season pursuing other people.

Season three is senior year, Kitty and Minho finally together, arguing constantly while she neglects her academics and he being dramatically rich about it.

Every single season ends almost exactly where it started. The show is aware of this. It has started making jokes about it. Somehow, that just makes it more watchable.

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XO Kitty Official Playlist

What Actually Works

The show is genuinely funny and gets funnier as it goes.

By season two, it has figured out who the comedic characters are and uses them properly. The fourth wall winks about how unhinged the plot is land better than they should.

There are moments of real warmth buried under all the chaos, particularly anything involving Kitty’s search for her mother’s history in Korea, which is the emotional backbone the show keeps neglecting and then returning to right when you’d given up on it.

Minho is the best character in the series, and it’s not close. He starts as the rich, dramatic guy who confesses his love to a girl thirty minutes after she dumped his best friend, which is insane behaviour, and somehow by season three, he has actual depth and a family storyline that makes you care about him properly. His dynamic with Kitty has genuine warmth when the show slows down enough to let it breathe.

Day is also underrated, and I will die on this hill. He is sweet and loyal and consistently treated worse than he deserves.

The senior year setting in season three gives the show a bittersweet quality that actually suits it. Field trips, bucket lists, things ending. When it leans into that, it reminds you there’s a real heart somewhere underneath all the drama.

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What Doesn’t Work for Me

Kitty has not learned Korean. She is in her third year at a Korean boarding school, where she moved specifically to connect with her mother’s culture.

I’m not expecting fluency. One sentence. One full sentence in Korean.

The show keeps gesturing at her cultural identity storyline and then stepping back from it right when it could go somewhere meaningful.

The friend group has too many people in it and not enough scenes of them actually being friends. Their conversations are almost entirely about whatever drama Kitty has created that week. There is a ski trip in season two where you genuinely cannot work out why half the people are there.

Kitty herself is a frustrating protagonist because she makes the same mistakes every single season, knows she’s making them, and makes them anyway. The show acknowledges this, but continues not to do anything about it.

She cheated on someone while pursuing someone else, whom she was also kind of cheating on, and the show moved on within two episodes. The bisexual storyline in season two gets introduced, given real weight, and then quietly shelved in favour of the Minho endgame. That one genuinely annoyed me. MAKE IT MAKE SENSE!

New characters show up in season three, create a problem, and disappear before you’ve learned their names.

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My Final Verdict

XO Kitty is Emily in Paris, but in Seoul and with better hair. It’s tropey, messy, occasionally brilliant, and deeply committed to never fully fixing its own problems.

The show knows exactly what it is and has zero interest in being anything else.

If you go in expecting groundbreaking teen drama, you will be disappointed. But if you go in wanting to watch chaos unfold across three seasons of gorgeous Korean scenery with a protagonist who has never once learned from her mistakes, you will have a fantastic time.

I have watched all of it. I will watch season four. We don’t need to talk about this.

Are you team Minho or do you think Kitty should just be single for once in her life? Tell me in the comments.