There’s a very specific kind of show Netflix is good at sneaking up on people with — the ones you don’t plan to care about, and then suddenly you’re five episodes deep, emotionally invested in teenagers making questionable choices. XO, Kitty falls squarely into that category.
This is funny because on paper, it shouldn’t feel like a phenomenon. It’s a spinoff; a side character from To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before gets her own show, heads to Seoul, and gets tangled up in romance. You expect something pleasant, maybe a little disposable, but it’s something that keeps you gripped, especially if you cared about the movie franchise in the first place.
What XO, Kitty Is Actually About
Anna Cathcart as Kitty and Sang Heon Lee as Min-ho in XO, Kitty Season 3.Image via Netflix
Kitty Song-Covey (Anna Cathcart) ships herself off to the Korean Independent School of Seoul with a pretty straightforward goal: reunite with her long-distance boyfriend and feel closer to the mother she lost. That plan lasts maybe an episode because XO, Kitty isn’t really interested in letting anything stay simple. Relationships unravel, then re-form in slightly different shapes, crushes multiply, people lie, or don’t lie, exactly, but definitely don’t say the whole truth.
Kitty has always appeared to possess a certain knowledge of love, according to the films, but is discovering that perhaps she doesn’t truly understand it after all, and, rightly, is likely to come to that conclusion. Throughout this series of events, the show plays with the theme of someone who has believed they know what love is, only to be confronted with the reality that they actually don’t. The approach is very direct, but effective.
Collider Exclusive · Oscar Best Picture Quiz Which Oscar Best Picture Is Your Perfect Movie? Parasite · Everything Everywhere · Oppenheimer · Birdman · No Country
Five Oscar Best Picture winners. Five completely different visions of what cinema can be — and what it can do to you. One of them is the film that was made for the way your mind works. Ten questions will figure out which one.
🪜Parasite
🌀Everything Everywhere
☢️Oppenheimer
🐦Birdman
🪙No Country for Old Men
01
What kind of film experience do you actually want? The best movies don’t just entertain — they leave something behind.
02
Which idea grabs you most in a film? Great films are driven by a central obsession. What’s yours?
03
How do you like your story told? Form is content. The way a story is shaped changes what it means.
04
What makes a truly great antagonist? The opposition defines the protagonist. What kind of opposition fascinates you?
05
What do you want from a film’s ending? The final note is the one that lingers. What do you want it to sound like?
06
Which setting pulls you in most? Where a film takes place shapes everything — mood, stakes, what’s even possible.
07
What cinematic craft impresses you most? Every great film has a signature — a technical or artistic element that makes it unmistakable.
08
What kind of main character do you root for? The protagonist is the lens. Who you choose to follow says something about you.
09
How do you feel about a film that takes its time? Pace is a choice. Some films sprint; others let tension accumulate slowly, deliberately.
10
What do you want to feel walking out of the cinema? The best films leave a mark. What kind of mark do you want?
The Academy Has Decided Your Perfect Film Is…
Your answers have pointed to one Oscar Best Picture winner above all others. This is the film that was made for the way your mind works.
Parasite
You are drawn to films that operate on multiple levels simultaneously — that begin in one genre and quietly, brilliantly migrate into another. Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite is a film about class, desire, and the architecture of inequality that manages to be darkly funny, deeply suspenseful, and genuinely shocking across a single extraordinary running time. Your instinct is for cinema that hides its true intentions until the moment it’s ready to reveal them. Parasite is exactly that — a film that rewards close attention and punishes assumptions, right up to its devastating final image.
Everything Everywhere All at Once
You want it all — and this film gives you all of it. The Daniels’ Everything Everywhere All at Once is one of the most maximalist films ever made: action comedy, multiverse sci-fi, family drama, existential crisis, and a genuinely earned emotional core that sneaks up on you amid the chaos. You are someone who responds to ambition, who doesn’t want cinema to choose between being entertaining and being meaningful. This film refuses that choice entirely. It is overwhelming by design, and its overwhelming nature is precisely the point — because the feeling of being crushed by infinite possibility is exactly what it’s about.
Oppenheimer
You are drawn to cinema on a grand scale — films that understand history not as a backdrop but as a force, and that place their characters inside that force and watch what happens. Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer is a film about the terrifying gap between what we can do and what we should do, told with the full weight of one of the most consequential moments in human history behind it. You want your films to feel important without feeling self-important — to earn their ambition through sheer craft and the gravity of their subject. Oppenheimer does exactly that. It is enormous, complicated, and refuses easy comfort.
Birdman
You are drawn to films that foreground their own construction — that make the how of the filmmaking part of the what it’s about. Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Birdman, shot to appear as a single continuous take, is cinema examining itself through the cracked mirror of a fading actor’s ego. You respond to formal daring, to the feeling that a film is doing something that probably shouldn’t be possible. Michael Keaton’s performance and Emmanuel Lubezki’s restless camera create something genuinely unlike anything else — a film that is simultaneously about creativity, relevance, self-destruction, and the impossibility of ever truly knowing if your work means anything at all.
No Country for Old Men
You are drawn to cinema that trusts silence, that refuses to explain itself, and that treats dread as a form of meaning. The Coen Brothers’ No Country for Old Men is a film about the arrival of a new kind of evil — implacable, arbitrary, and utterly indifferent to the moral frameworks we use to make sense of the world. It is one of the most formally controlled films ever made, and its controlled restraint is what makes it so terrifying. You want your films to haunt you, not comfort you. You are not interested in resolution if resolution would be dishonest. No Country for Old Men is honest in a way that most cinema never dares to be.
There are stretches of XO, Kitty that feel overstuffed. Too many plotlines, not enough breathing room, a tendency to jump ahead and expect you to just catch up. It can feel like you missed an episode even when you didn’t. And yet—it’s hard to stop watching. Part of that is the ensemble. The core group — Kitty, Yuri (Gia Kim), Min Ho (Sang Heon Lee), Dae (Choi Min-yeong), Q (Anthony Keyvan) — has that lived-in, slightly chaotic chemistry that makes even the clunkier storylines go down easier. When they’re all together, the show relaxes a bit; there’s a looseness to those scenes.
Also, and this matters more than the show probably gets credit for, Seoul isn’t just aesthetic window dressing. Kitty’s connection to her Korean heritage — something that started as a vague emotional pull — becomes more specific and more complicated the longer she stays. That thread gives the show weight when the romance starts spinning its wheels.
The Romance Is the Draw—But Not Always the Strength
Gia Kim turns away while prepping tea with Regan Aliyah in XO, Kitty Season 2Image via Netflix
This is where things get a little uneven. XO, Kitty sells itself as a romance (and, yes, there’s plenty of that), but the actual execution can feel frustrating in a very specific, very familiar way. Miscommunication stretches on longer than it should. Big emotional beats get delayed, interrupted, sidestepped. You’ll probably find yourself thinking, just say the thing. They almost never do.
Season 3 leans heavily into Kitty’s relationship with Min Ho, which should feel like a payoff after all that buildup. Sometimes it does, but other times, it feels like the show is stalling — creating tension where a single honest conversation would clear everything up. But even when the romance falters, the show doesn’t completely lose you because it’s never just about the couple. it’s about who these characters are becoming around each other, and sometimes despite each other.
It’s Really a Coming-of-Age Story
‘XO, Kitty’ Season 2, Anna Cathcart taking a selfie with her friends.Image via Netflix
Even though there are many moments consisting of love triangles, near-confessing to one another, and timing creating dramatic moments, the best moments of XO, Kitty are when romantic moments are completely removed from the series. There are scenes that feature Yuri as she copes with her family breaking apart, Q as he makes decisions he will not be able to easily take back, and also Kitty paying for her impulsive actions for once, and those scenes hit harder than big romantic gestures.
There is a version of this series that embraces that aspect; it embraces the craziness of growing up, and how your identity changes based on where you are located and who you are with. You can see it trying to be that show. Sometimes it gets there. Sometimes it veers back into safer, more familiar territory.
Being tied to To All the Boys is both a strength and a crutch. When familiar faces pop up — like Lara Jean (Lana Condor)— it’s hard not to feel a little hit of recognition. That world still works. The sister dynamic, especially, has an easy warmth to it that the show taps into effectively.
It’s not a perfect series, but it’s watchable in that specific, slightly compulsive way — one episode bleeding into the next, characters getting under your skin before you fully realize it. You start watching out of curiosity, you keep watching because, somehow, you’ve picked sides, and now you kind of need to know what happens next.
