XO, Kitty

The Geography of a Heartbeat

There’s a specific kind of arrogance that belongs exclusively to teenagers—the unshakable, dizzying certainty that you have decoded the machinery of human affection. You think love is a puzzle you’ve solved because you’ve watched enough movies or witnessed your friends navigate their messy, tentative dalliances. Kitty Song Covey, the relentless protagonist of Jenny Han’s *XO, Kitty*, carries this hubris like a shield. Having spent the better part of the *To All the Boys* universe orchestrating the romantic lives of others, she arrives in Seoul, South Korea, assuming that the rules of the game are universal. But the show—which spans three seasons of escalating ambition and heartache—understands that love isn't a strategy to be mastered. It’s a terrain you get lost in.



When the series moves from the cozy, suburban domesticity of Portland to the high-stakes, hyper-competitive environment of the Korean International School of Seoul (KISS), the shift isn't just about setting. It's an atmospheric total rewrite. Jenny Han, ever the architect of modern YA angst, uses this relocation to force Kitty into a profound state of displacement. Suddenly, she isn't the puppet master; she’s the one stumbling through language barriers and cultural expectations, trying to keep her grip on a long-distance relationship that, frankly, was built on the shaky foundation of a fantasy. It’s here that Anna Cathcart’s performance becomes essential. Cathcart has this way of blinking—a quick, nervous flutter of the eyelids—that tells us more about her character’s internal panic than any monologue could. She’s confident, yes, but when that mask slips, you see the frightened child beneath the matchmaker’s bravado.

The show navigates the familiar rhythms of the high school rom-com, but it refuses to stay comfortable. There’s a scene early on, where Kitty is staring at a dorm room she assumed would be a sanctuary, only to find the reality of living in a foreign country—where you are both an outsider and an unexpected participant in a complex social hierarchy—pressing in on her. She tries to assert her personality, to impose her "Covey" logic on the room, but the room resists. The pacing here is frantic, mirroring her racing thoughts, before the camera settles into a static, observational long take. It’s a quiet moment in a noisy show, one that acknowledges that the most important growth often happens when we are forced to be silent.



What surprised me most, across the twenty-six episodes, is the show’s willingness to let its characters be unlikable, or at least deeply confused. In many YA series, the "truth" of a relationship is static. Here, the ground shifts beneath them. Take the character of Dae, played by Choi Min-yeong. He has to carry the weight of being the "perfect" boyfriend who turns out to be a flawed, actual human being. It’s a tricky balance to strike—to be the object of desire and the agent of disappointment simultaneously. *IndieWire’s* Ben Travers noted early on that the show manages to be "a frothy, fun expansion of the *To All the Boys* universe," but that feels like an understatement as the series matures. By the third season, the "froth" has largely evaporated, replaced by a more sober exploration of how our identities are inextricably linked to where—and who—we come from.

We have to talk about Gia Kim, who plays Yuri with a simmering, guarded intensity. She is, in many ways, the foil to Kitty’s overt transparency. While Kitty wears her heart on her sleeve (sometimes to her own detriment), Yuri keeps hers behind a fortress of privilege and family expectation. Watching the two of them circle one another—the way they hold space in a frame, often pushed to opposite sides of the screen to signify their initial distance—is a masterclass in visual storytelling. They aren't just falling for each other; they are colliding. And unlike the tidy conclusions of the films that birthed this spin-off, *XO, Kitty* allows these collisions to leave marks.



Whether the series perfectly resolves all its narrative tangles is almost beside the point. Life doesn't offer clean resolutions; it offers new chapters. By the time the final episode credits roll, the show has moved far beyond the initial premise of "matchmaker meets world." It becomes something else: a portrait of the messy, painful, exhilaration of self-discovery. Kitty doesn't just learn about the boy she traveled across the world to find; she learns that the most difficult, rewarding, and transformative relationship she will ever have is the one she maintains with herself. It’s a lesson that, given how much we cling to our teenage certainty, most of us spend a lifetime trying to master.