The first episode of the new Netflix romcom XO, Kitty runs through its exposition like a sprint.
It starts with our 16-year-old biracial Korean American protagonist Kitty Song Covey (Anna Cathcart) hopping a plane from her home in Portland to the Korean Independent School of Seoul, or Kiss, her late mother’s alma mater. It’s also the current school of her long-distance boyfriend, Dae (Minyeong Choi), and she’s just enrolled without telling him – an unannounced romantic gesture that, to no adult viewer’s surprise, ends in utter disaster. Kitty soon finds out that Yuri, the teen hotel heiress who gives her a ride on their first day of school, is actually Dae’s girlfriend. And throughout his relationship with Kitty, Dae’s also been lying about his family’s economic status: he’s struggling to afford tuition, and his father is Yuri’s family driver. Yuri’s mother, Jin (Yunjin Kim), meanwhile, is the principal of Kiss, and for reasons unknown chooses to lie about having been friends with Kitty’s mother, despite a 20-year-old photograph featuring the two of them together. Yuri’s got her own secret, too: she’s been paying Dae to be her boyfriend, using their fake relationship to cover up her real love for a girl named Juliana.
