How to center bar plot in python matplotlib?

Question

I am working on a Coursera cert and I noticed that the plots in their example labs and assignments come out like this:

I would like to do a couple things. One, if possible(but might not be necessary), to remove the legend "figure 1", the on/off symbol and the buttons at the bottom of the image. By the way, I really don't understand where this feature comes from, I hope someone can explain. Two, the main thing I want to fix is making all the labels(ticks) in the y-axis visible, i.e. move them towards the right.

The Python version in their Jupyter notebook is:

from platform import python_version
print(python_version())
3.6.2

The imports I am working with:

%matplotlib notebook
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import pandas as pd
import numpy as np

import warnings
warnings.filterwarnings('ignore')

And the code that generated the plot:

categ_series.plot(kind='barh', figsize=(8, 6))
plt.show()