Just as the rich and therefore troubled teens of the Upper East Side on Gossip Girl, the second Netflix original series set in Rome (the other being Suburra), Baby, centers on two private school friends, Chiara (Benedetta Porcaroli) and Ludovica (Alice Pagani). Unlike Serena Van Der Woodsen (Blake Lively) and Blair Waldorf (Leighton Meester)–also the necessary combination of blonde and brunette besties for serving as a cliched “double threat” to men–Chiara and Ludovica are, unquestionably, far more willing to go the extra mile in proving just how much living in affluence can fuck a girl up. In Rome’s version of the Upper East Side, Parioli, Chiara describes the stifling lifestyle best with the lines that both open and close the series: “If you’re sixteen and live in Rome’s most beautiful neighborhood, you’re lucky. Ours is the best possible world. We’re immersed in a wonderful see-through fish tank. But we long for the sea. That’s why, to survive, we need a secret life.”
Except in the case of the actual girls the story is based on from the Baby Squillo (a.k.a., as Janis Ian would say, “baby prostitute”) scandal, it was, in true Bling Ring fashion, all about wanting to afford the designer clothes and accessories associated with Parioli wealth. For Chiara and Ludo, it’s more about wanting to cultivate some semblance of their own life. And so they cultivate it as a result of more than mildly hating the background they come from. Ludo in particular can’t stand her divorced parents, forced to live with her Mrs. George-esque mother, Simonetta (Isabella Ferrari), a woman so out of touch with reality and what’s happening in her own house that she doesn’t think twice when Ludo tells her blatant lies about where she manages to get an expensive red Fendi bag or the six thousand dollars for her private school tuition (Ludo insists her dad gave her the money, but somewhere deep down, Simonetta knows it’s not true). Rather than get it from her father, who has written her off as a “disgrazia” while talking behind her back to Ludo’s sister–his favorite daughter–she turns to Fiore (Giuseppe Maggio), a pimp/bartender at a nightclub called Mirage, run by requisite greaseball Saverio (Paolo Calabresi). Like most girls damaged by a lack of paternal love, Ludo finds herself confusing Fiore’s “affections” as a substitute for the unconditional amore that’s missing from her life. Realizing too late that she’s gone down the wrong path with him (and, what’s more, made a psycho fall in love with her), Ludo also apprehends that she is always going to be fundamentally different from Chiara, who has that “posh,” “classy” way about her that makes men from all walks of life swoon, including new student/”bad boy” Damiano Younes (Riccardo Mandolini), son to an ambassador for an Arab country. In true Italian style, of course, it is never stated which Arab country because, to them, all Arabs are “Arab scum” (as a fellow student writes on Damiano’s desk).
Structured over the course of six episodes, each storyline is carefully interwoven into that of Chiara and Ludo’s. That the adults in the show are even more emotionally crippled than their children draws yet another parallel to Gossip Girl, the likes of Lily Van Der Woodsen (Kelly Rutherford) and Eleanor Waldorf (Margaret Colin) rivaling the ill-advised antics of, for example, Damiano’s stepmother, Monica (Claudia Pandolfi), the track and field coach at Collodi who throws caution to the wind in getting involved with a student, Niccolò (Lorenzo Zurzolo), who also happens to have had a dalliance with Chiara despite being the brother of her now ex-best friend (sort of the Sharon Chursky of the series), Camilla (Chabeli Sastre Gonzalez). If it all sounds very fraught and convoluted in the vein of pretty much any 00s era WB show, it is–except even more so because of the elevated sense of drama Italians are naturally born with.
With most episodes directed by Andrea De Sica (yes, related to Vittorio) and Anna Negri, as well as created by the writing collective known as GRAMS (Antonio Le Fosse, Re Salvador, Eleonora Trucchi, Marco Raspanti and Giacomo Mazzariol), the cohesion of the show in terms of its themes of playing up the alienated and disenfranchised “poor rich kid” trope gives Gossip Girl a firm run for its money (no pun intended), particularly as Italians have always showcased a greater willingness to get down and dirty (“trash italiano” isn’t a term for nothing) in their narratives. And it is a willingness that seems to be cropping up evermore in the twenty-first century as the country does its best to offer a new renaissance in the long-time absence of Fellini, Antonioni and, of course, De Sica.
