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This week, we took a quick break from weighty topics — like major life decisions and very important reality TV drama — to watch the latest teen rom-com offering from the Jenny Han cinematic universe: “XO, Kitty.” The Netflix series centers around the bubbly kid sister of “To All The Boys” heroine Lara Jean, and this time Kitty (Anna Cathcart) is sorta grownup and ready for her own perfect love story.

As the series begins, Kitty is headed off to Korea to spend her junior year of high school at the Korean Independent School of Seoul. She’s hoping to connect with her late mom (who spent her own junior year as a student there) and her long-distance boyfriend Dae (who is a current K.I.S.S. student). Best case: she gets both a new understanding of a mother she barely remembers and her elusive first kiss with Dae.

Instead, everything immediately goes wrong — Dae is in a (possibly fake) relationship with a gorgeous heiress, she’s been assigned to a boys’ dorm room, and she stumbles upon her mom’s best friend from K.I.S.S. but the woman won’t even acknowledge their relationship. Soon she’s caught up in an unexpected maze of love triangles and squares, and she’s neglecting her schoolwork while trying to unravel a mystery about a secret baby born while her mom was in Korea.

“XO, Kitty” is an unabashedly silly show in many ways; the plot turns are implausible and powered largely by truckloads of unlikely coincidences, and Kitty’s emotional range (which ranges from somewhat disappointed to irrepressibly perky) rarely seems to match the truly soap-operatic rollercoaster the series takes her on. It draws liberally from the K-drama genre, and revels in every campy twist. But the stories it has to tell about connecting with a lost loved one, and about the beauty and impermanence of young love, felt true enough to really hit home. By the end, we were right back in the rich hormonal and emotional stew of our own teenage years.

We talked about all of this, plus Kitty’s queer storyline — the first for a lead in a Jenny Han show — in this week’s episode. Hope you enjoy! XO, us.

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