Baby, the popular and controversial Italian Netflix show has brought itself a bit more heat recently, this time from Lebanon for apparently misrepresenting the Lebanese flag in one of its episodes.
Toward the end of Episode 2 of the second season, one of the modern-day series’ characters is shown in a scene, supposedly at the Lebanese Embassy, with a Lebanese flag in his background.
However, as some Lebanese Reddit users have pointed out, the flag shown in the embassy is clearly not the Lebanese flag; not the modern one at least.
The flag is actually a replica of the one used during Lebanon’s French Mandate era. It has vertical blue and red stripes, respectively on the left and right sides of a green cedar tree at its center.
It’s unclear why the show’s creators included the pre-independence version that dates back several decades, and it seems fairly improbable that it’s the result of a lazy mistake.
This is because the current Lebanese flag can be found very easily with a simple Google search, and it’s much more likely to come across the modern flag than its old version.
With that said, some Redditors seem to think that the replacement of the Lebanese flag with that of the French Mandate is a deliberate move that aims to send a “subtle political message.”
However, judging by Baby‘s apolitical nature, it’s implausible that this is the case.
Instead, some speculate that the flag is simply intended to be a piece of memorabilia in the story – considering one of the characters is depicted as pro-France – or an Easter Egg.
For some context, the main storyline of the show follows two students, Chiara and Ludovica, who engage in prostitution at their school in order to make money and gain access to luxuries they wouldn’t otherwise be able to afford.
And, along their scandalous journey, they come to meet the Lebanese “bad boy” of the story, Damiano Younes, who is the illegitimate child of the Lebanese Ambassador to Italy, in which the scene in question supposedly takes place.
On a side note, nearly a month ago, the Lebanese flag (the proper one) appeared on Netflix, in a La Casa de Papel documentary that featured the Lebanese revolution.
