REVIEW: ‘XO Kitty’ Season 2 Carries Just Enough Steam

The To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before sequel series XO Kitty Season 2 returns, establishing the tone and story a lot quicker this time around. Katherine “Kitty” Song-Covey discovers more drama in Korea, minus the K-drama aesthetics—despite feeling like one.  Some stunningly beautiful new blood joins the cast, with everyone looking to find love amongst the educational stars.

As a refresher, Anna Cathcart reprises her role from the original film Kitty. Kitty is determined to conquer her love story after helping her older sister, Lara Jean (Lana Condor), achieve her fairytale ending. This means she’s back attending another year at the prestigious school, KISS, aka the Korea Independent School of Seoul, on her continued special heritage scholarship.

While Kitty may have stirred things up for the better or worse before, it’s nothing compared to what she gets up to in XO Kitty Season 2. The new series has a bunch more twists, turns and facepalmable moments. This series continues to get more bonkers with wild conclusions, with so many different plots and characters that it becomes a bit hard to track. Paying attention to the acting credits and writing a list of the cast members is almost a must. That being said, more characters mean there’s a variety of stories to tell.

XO Kitty Season 2 embraces the ridiculous in the familiar

Kitty returns to KISS, hoping to avoid her previous year of drama. She also wants to do better academically by living in a single dormitory rather than a joint one. To top things off, she wants to find out more about her mom, Eve Song-Covey’s time in Korea, explore her newfound discovery of being bisexual, and ‘help’ who she can better than before.

With all that said, she has plenty of drama from the get-go. Min Ho (Sang Heon Lee) confesses his love to Kitty on their plane ride home before heading home to Portland in her junior year, only for Kitty to turn him down due to poor timing right after her breakup with ex-boyfriend, Dae (Minyeong Choi).

Speaking of Dae, he is still coming to terms with getting over his breakup with Kitty by going to parties and meeting new people. Meanwhile, Kitty is doing the same to get over her feelings for her close friend Yuri (Gia Kim), who is already dating Juliana (Regan Aliyah). Kitty’s closest confidant, Quincy “Q” Shabazian (Anthony Keyvan), is still dealing with the aftermath of his ex-boyfriend Florian’s choice to cheat on their last exams. On the adult side, Professor Lee is trying to learn his responsibilities as the new principal of KISS while exploring his new relationship with his son, Mr. Kim.

If that’s all a lot to keep up with, don’t worry. There’s a lot more love and messiness added with this season. For one, XO Kitty Season 2 brings in new cast members. Kitty gets a new love interest with a new student, Praveena (Sasha Bhasin); Q gets a new love interest, fellow track runner Jin (Joshua Hyunho Lee); and Kitty, Yuri and Juliana’s new dorm member Stella (Audrey Huynh) joins the crossfire of love triangles and tribulations. And as shown in trailers, Noah Centineo makes a return to reprise his role as Peter from the films. His visit to Korea does correlate to his character’s and Kitty’s story.

The times of bad voiceover work in live-action seem to be making a resurgence because XO Kitty Season 2 continues to show it. But now, XO Kitty Season 2 is almost egregious with its voiceover. There’s rarely a point where a character is talking and their lips aren’t moving. For example, there are a lot of shots where the camera is capturing a conversation between two people but the camera is angled where the viewer can’t see their mouth. This filming technique allows the actors to do voiceover in post-production; it could be a sign that the lines may have been changed afterwards.

There’s a scene in a club where the voiceover abnormally doesn’t mesh with the club’s music and ambiance. Yes, the audio for their voices could be slightly turned up but this was like where the volume of the whole room was turned down, and it wasn’t even for a specific story purpose. Other moments throughout XO Kitty Season 2 include voiceover work that needed more editing to make it look and blend into the scenes better.

Much like the target audience for this series, the storytelling pacing is great and fast-paced, with twists and turns. The attention span for most younger audience members can be very short. When the reveals and truths come out, they are typically dealt with within a reasonable time and manner. That said, certain moments deserved some breathing room that the runtime of this eight 30-minute-long episode series doesn’t allow.

At its core, XO Kitty Season 2 propels everything that other queer and diverse shows have done—but ratcheted up to a thousand. With 2025 in full swing, these are intriguing stories of students that somewhat represent the teens of the current times. For the most part, the show understands teenage angst, but there are moments that blur the lines of reality.

Anna Cathcart continues to hold things together

For example, the ridiculous heists to get a VHS from a time capsule kept in the principal’s storage is a little far-fetched. While the plot points may be out there, real-life teenage drama can be just as crazy. The only issue with all these plot points is that there’s way too much for eight episodes, with some stronger storylines being sacrificed for more dramatic ones.

The tone of making XO Kitty, an American/South Korean production, appears to be fighting onscreen at times, which could throw viewers off. The combination of American and Korean styles of drama has some trouble working together and can interfere with the viewing experience. An example is simple b-roll shots throughout this season, which are shot like a KDrama would, but the cuts are so fast that the visual storytelling almost gets lost. 

It also diminishes the charm of South Korea’s city and countryside landscapes, with their cherry blossoms and luminous night cityscape lights. This can be a nitpicky issue, though, as not many shows have tried to blend American and Korean drama styles much before.

Cathcart continues to be the glue that reinforces her role as Kitty the Matchmaker in the trilogy films as much as she does so in this series. The core theme of family doesn’t lose its way either. This bleeds into the film’s focus on representation, where the diaspora of peoples’ roots comes into play.

Through all the romance and comedy, XO Kitty is heartwarming for the reason that Kitty yearns to find a better connection with her mom by seeking out untold stories and family lineages even her father and sisters don’t know about. This could be any teen story, as many minority or biracial kids who grew up in North America won’t really understand their parents’ stories where their parents grew up in completely countries and societal norms.

Arguably, the complexity of every queer character’s storyline has yet to have any real depth, but their bonds remain steadfast. Having this representation shown in South Korea is monumental, as many local productions tend to shy away from these stories in media—though more are starting to explore the topic.

Another popular Kdrama, Itaewon Class, attempted to have some commentary on being a queer minority in Korea but ended up being a loose thread in the overarching story. What XO Kitty Season 2 executes well is how it blends the styles of American and Korean production—adding in tropes of both styles.

One of the greater parts of  XO Kitty Season 2 is its use of K-pop songs from the likes of Blackpink and Twice last season. This season brought musical tracks from AIMERS, CRAVITY, cignature, Aespa, and Jungkook from BTS, among many more. Surprisingly, we don’t get any Stray Kids material here, given their rapid rise in popularity. Again, this is just a nitpicky observation, as most of the music fits the tone of the story beats.

Even with all of XO Kitty Season 2’s technical faults, crazy fake loves and cheesy storylines, there’s always enough charm and drama to hook and reel audiences back in for a binge-worthy watch. This show’s strengths are kept intact, with Kitty wanting to know more about her mom’s teenhood and potentially long-lost family members. Yes, Kitty wants to find a romantic connection with someone from school but she never jeopardizes her family goals.

With shocking twists and reveals, XO Kitty Season 2 may even get viewers with a few tear-jerking moments, too.

XO Kitty Season 2 is available to stream on Netflix now.