Premiering today on Netflix, Canadian comedian Katherine Ryan’s show The Dutchess features a semi-autobiographical experience of a single mother raising her daughter.
Ryan, also raising a daughter, changes up the ‘single-parent’ stereotypes within most dramas and comedies by making the series focus on the social struggles parents face while raising a child.
Ryan and her daughter are extremely close – to the point that her daughter attends a fertility clinic consultation to request a sibling. Ryan faces intimacy issues and psychologically steers away from a relationship in order to avoid repeating her past.
Within her personal struggles, she also is defending her daughter against a school bully and the mother, running a feminist pottery store, and maintaining what can only be described as a ‘interesting’ relationship with her daughter’s father.
While this show does break away from conventional discussions of single parenthood, and focuses on the effects of the parent’s social life outside of their child, the series is overly dramatic.
While single parents face immense feats every day, Ryan’s character’s conflicts stem from entirely self-caused events. This doesn’t make me root for her redemption in any way, and instead makes me want to yell at her through the screen to figure it out herself.
The only redeeming quality of her character, is the poignantly written insults she fires at her child’s bully, ex-boyfriend, and other people causing her grief.
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