'The Duchess': Katherine Ryan flips gender stereotype for dentist boyfriend, Evan’s desperation a true anomaly
You know from Episode 1 onward that one character is definitely not 'drawn from life' -- that of Evan, played by Steen Raskopoulos. Evan, the dentist, is the placeholder boyfriend who comes over to fuck Katherine once a week, gives her and her kid, Olive, free dental, walks the dogs, tells Katherine he loves her. He never bothers her in any other way, never talks about his problems like what that bratty kid did in his clinic or any other thing he is going through. He also runs from his clinic to where Katherine is having her 'o my baby girl is growing up' meltdown AFTER he has caught Katherine in a gigantic lie and broken up with her.
He is wildly understanding and thinks that Katherine treats him, the current boyfriend, like sh*t because her ex, Shep, did a number on her and she has resultant "trust issues". Evan's levels of masochism, for taking on the humiliation served with a side of emotional abuse dished out by Katherine on a daily basis, is unreal. Evan's friend compares her to a slot machine that Evan is scared to abandon.
Why? Because he has invested so much time and effort in her that he knows he is close to winning the pot and is scared that if he leaves, the next guy will win the jackpot. He points out that Katherine throws some crumbs to him from time to time to keep him hooked but that she, the House, will always 'win'.
In this 'game', Evan is playing for love, intimacy, of becoming a part of Katherine's family unit, instead of being pushed to its emotional periphery. Katherine is playing for free dental, and a convenient weekly f**k, separated from her 'real' life with her daughter. When you are watching the show, Evan's character feels like a plot device to showcase Katherine's independence.
I dare you to think of one man who would fit Evan's description and behavior. Now, think of the number of women who fit Evan's description and act like him and take emotional abuse like him in their relationships to unstable, emotionally unavailable men who are commitment-phobic.
According to Katherine Ryan, the show's writer/creator, she wrote Evan to be a "romcom woman", like: "'Oh! Please marry me!' Because I just see too many women doing that, and I don't see any men doing that..." Ryan, understandably, did not want a character based on her to be pathetic like that and so she flipped the gender stereotype.
But in doing so, she also, inadvertently, held up a mirror to modern-day relationships between men and women -- where men get the free f**k and dental, while women pour their time and emotional investment into men-shaped slot machines, hoping to hit the jackpot. Why is it that we find a man like Evan taking emotional abuse so unbelievable when the same scenario of a financially-independent woman taking that sort of emotional abuse is so commonplace that it is an established trope in sitcoms and dramas?
'The Duchess' premiered On Netflix on September 11.