Bill: "Your work here in the last year has been…How should I put it?" Catherine: "I don’t know, but I can sure tell you where you should put it." ("Rose Bowl" [3-15]) "You should tell him [Bill] he’s fired! But then, tell him that you won’t fire him if he can guess why he’s fired!" – Catherine Duke ("Sleeping" [3-21])

Catherine Duke’s sex appeal was coupled to a prickly personality that kept the men at bay. Most importantly, her incessant stylishness provided the perfect foil and counterpoint for some of the antics of the other characters. Bill, at least, needed someone to slap him in the face every now and then. As the Joe-Catherine relationship was developed, Joe got his share of ‘bitch-slapping’ as well. This became such a motif for Catherine that in "Catherine Moves On" [4-7], after being told that she did not slap anyone, Jimmy, who has been trying to work out why Catherine is quitting, asks, "Sure this is Catherine we’re talking about?" Catherine seemed to have a little less screen time than the other characters, but her role was to provide punctuation marks to the comedy. Sometimes this punctuation was physical. At other times it was verbal, as demonstrated by when she hears Bill’s imitation of black street patois for a malt liquor commercial and her only comment is "Oh…my…Lord!" ("Office Feud" [3-19]).

Paul Simms admitted that Catherine Duke was the hardest character to write for because she was the last major character to be added to the show (and in "Pilot" her character was played by Ella Joyce rather than Khandi Alexander). It may have been the character’s origins as an afterthought to the show’s original conception that made writing plots for her a continual problem. Although her fireworks with Joe and Bill provided some of the highlights of season two and three, Catherine never had a plotline devoted exclusively to her with the exception of "Catherine Moves On" [4-7], her farewell episode. The writers even played upon this difficulty in "Review" [3-2] by placing the following statement in the New York Radio Guide review: "Catherine Duke is one of the finest news anchors in the city, although chronically underused." Despite this it is an indication of Khandi Alexander’s formidable acting talent that she had so much profitable mileage in the role.

Alexander left the show after the seventh episode of the fourth season. The show survived without her, even having some of its very best episodes after her departure, but I suspect that these episodes would have been even stronger with her there. Her departure left the cast with slightly less balance. They attempted to add to the cast, most noticeably with Brad Rowe later in the season, but could never find an ideal additional cast member. Moreover, Catherine’s absence shifted the show’s balance in favor of the men. In "Kids" [3-16], before Catherine’s departure, the women are able to counter an all-male staff meeting with their own all-girl meeting (where they uncover a cache of porno magazines in Dave’s office, which they mistakenly believe to be Dave’s, leading to a comical all-girl conversation). These sorts of scenes were not possible after Catherine left. Furthermore, without Catherine to put the men in their place, the males had a tendency to run a bit rampant and gang up on Lisa. In the case of the brilliant episode "Jackass Junior High" [4-21], where Lisa is the only girl in the office and the men treat her as one of the guys, behaving like frat boys in front of her, this situation was used to great effect. However, the deepest art of NewsRadio was the communication of a breadth of human conditions and desires. In this context, a shortage of female characters made this communication a little less effective.