Summary
Back, and this time without the attention-grabbing controversy Netflix’s Italian teen drama still fails to make much of an impression.
You might remember Netflix’s Baby from late last year when it attracted some salacious headlines thanks to its vague association with a real-life prostitution scandal from 2014. A cynical man would probably suggest that a second season of the Italian teen drama only exists because of curiosity clicks (it was greenlit very soon after the release of the first) since the initial outing did very little to make an impression beyond the controversy. But I’ll leave that to others. In the meantime, Baby Season 2 debuted globally today for another six episodes of trashy misbehavior.
This show has its fans, most of whom will be happy to see the return of Chiara (Benedetta Porcaroli), Camilla (Chabeli Sastre Gonzalez) and Ludovica (Alice Pagani), and it’s easy to imagine they’ll be happy with Baby Season 2’s more-of-the-same approach. While the controversy suggested otherwise, this was a show that didn’t really have much of an interest in exploring the specifics of its Baby Squillo backdrop; it’s a show about teenage girls growing up in a classist Rome, making mistakes and major decisions. Nothing the show accomplishes during this second outing really does much to differentiate it from other teen-focused series’ about disaffected youth, although there’s enough cultural specificity for the frisson of real-life scandal to give the self-serious proceedings a bit of an edge.
