Exclusive Interview

‘XO, Kitty’ Boss Breaks Down Kitty & Yuri’s Surprising Shift in Season 3

Kitty Song Covey (Anna Cathcart) spends the first two seasons of XO, Kitty navigating her extremely messy love life. She feels things out with a number of love interests, from Dae (Choi Min-yeong) to Praveena (Sasha Bhasin), but she develops her strongest connections with Yuri (Gia Kim) and Min Ho (Sang Heon Lee). The show’s relationship web, however, gets significantly less complicated in Season 3. (Warning: The following contains MAJOR spoilers for XO, Kitty Season 3.)

Picking up right where Season 2 leaves off, Season 3 sees Kitty put all her focus on pursuing a romance with Min Ho, and every interaction with her old crush Yuri remains fully platonic. When Swooon sat down with showrunner Valentina Garza, who stepped into her role after working as a writer on Season 2, she explained that while Kitty “experienc[es] a myriad of different types of loves” this season, it didn’t make sense to put Kitty and Yuri on a romantic path.

“[Kitty] is a super loyal and committed friend who’s ride or die for people like Yuri,” Garza explained. “She is so, so committed in that friendship to Yuri and to making sure that Yuri gets to experience senior year with her, and she knows that it wouldn’t be the same if she didn’t have Yuri there. So we get to see her experience love in that way, and also just the love that she has for her family and really wanting to be a unifier in her family space.”

Netflix

Yuri, who cheats on Juliana (Regan Aliyah) when she kisses Kitty in Season 2, doesn’t get much romantic action in Season 3. After friend-zoning Kitty and breaking up with Juliana, Yuri’s dealing with the fallout of the class-action lawsuit against her family’s company.

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'XO, Kitty's Messy Relationships Web, Explained

Though her family loses their money, things are looking up for Yuri by the end of the season. She’s acquired enough funds to stay at KISS for senior year, and she’s starting to patch things up with Juliana. They haven’t officially gotten back together yet, they’re in a good place in the finale episode.

“Our characters are dealing with a lot more adult problems, and Yuri has had a really big kind of reversal of fortune in her life, so she’s really kind of focused on surviving in the moment, and Kitty is just there for her 100% in all of that,” Garza said. “So I think that in kind of the theme of becoming an adult and having to deal with some really hard decisions, that’s the path that we really felt that Yuri was focused on. So that made the most sense.”

XO, Kitty, Season 3, Streaming Now, Netflix