Katherine Ryan: 'Cancel the news – we have Twitter and Instagram'

The last TV show you loved

My husband and I just started watching I Hate Suzie. I heard about it on social media, – the best way to find out about programmes – and I really love Billie Piper. I love watching complicated female leads. But if I were to cheat on my husband, I wouldn’t be taking photos of it.

Your guilty pleasure TV

We really loved the American Office. We’ve seen all of it, but not for six years, maybe a decade. That is a lovely, relaxing, real comedy. I find it difficult and stressful to watch dramas, because I get really invested and really upset sometimes. At this point in the world, all I want is a comedy. I like following the blossoming romance between Pam and Jim; it’s such a beautiful love story.

Your favourite show when you were 10

We didn’t really have Canadian programming growing up – all of our television was from Detroit, which was the nearest city to where we lived on the border of the US. We would have Sister Sister, Family Matters, Moesha, Martin, Living Single; we had so many black families on television and not really any black families living in our town. So I just thought the black families were in Hollywood, making television. Those were some of my early comedic influences; I wanted to be Martin Lawrence for a long time; I wanted to be Urkel on Family Matters, too. I loved the warmth in those shows.

I want to watch Sister Sister with my daughter when it gets put on Netflix [it was added this month to the streaming service in the US]. To be able to share those nostalgic programmes with your kids is just surreal.

The show on which you would like to guest star

I loved Girls, Lena Dunham’s show. I was in my late 20s or early 30s when it came out and Girls was so important to me – it was the first time that I had seen body-positive comedy and different shapes of women. I thought it was so brave and dramatic; it really made me cry and laugh. The drama in Girls is the most drama that I can handle. Amy Schumer had a guest role and I’m fiercely jealous of her.

The show that should never have been cancelled …

I don’t even know what has been cancelled – I move on so quickly from loss. I know my daughter wishes The Big Bang Theory would never have ended, though. She loves it, even if we’re a little bit more discerning of that American sitcom rhythm in the UK. I can see why children especially like it, because they always know what’s coming. The joke writing on The Big Bang Theory is tight; the laughs per minute keep coming.

… and the show that should be

We should maybe cancel the news. It is no longer unbiased journalism, especially in certain places, and I think it can be very inflammatory. In the US, the news is especially divisive and fear-inciting. Cancel the news – we have Twitter, we have Instagram. Give me the weather, not the news.

A role you wished you had never turned down

No one is offering me roles. For good reason. I can play a heightened version of myself, but I am no Judi Dench and there’s nothing that I’ve ever turned down. One thing about me that people love to take the mickey out of is that I say yes, yes, yes. I have a great agent and I am busy. I would struggle to think of anything that I have turned down.

Your perfect TV moment

There are many moments in Catastrophe that I felt were perfect, packed with loads of vulnerability – and obviously anything with Carrie Fisher in. I liked the ending of Catastrophe and I wish that the show could have continued. I love any ending that’s open to interpretation and when they left the children sleeping in the car and they went for a swim, I imagined that they might have drowned. I don’t know what the intention of Rob and Sharon was, but I found it very poignant.

The Duchess, a sitcom written by and starring Katherine Ryan, is on Netflix from 11 September