The West Wing Character Study: Janel Moloney as "DONNA!"

 

As I may have written in a different context I think the character of Donna Moss was originally just supposed to be another among the secretarial pool at the Bartlet White House and no doubt just recurring rather than a series regular, the same way Mrs. Landingham and Margaret were. But in one of the many strokes of genius that Aaron Sorkin had while writing The West Wing, he very quickly recognized the talent of Janel Moloney as well as the chemistry she shared with Josh Lyman and by the time the first season was half over, the interactions between the two became a series highlight. At the start of Season 2 Moloney was a series regular and would be for the rest of the show’s run.

Throughout the first few seasons Donna frequently served as the voice of the audience; someone who Josh would ‘lovingly’ explain every detail of American policy to onscreen – and clearly all the time. But quickly Donna became something far bigger than this. Donna was not the kind of person who spoke truth to power: she was too even tempered for that. Her job – and both Sorkin and Moloney were brilliant at realizing this – was to have her puncture the balloons of the powerful egos at the White House, almost always unintentionally and always innocently. She was there to be a friend and a source of compassion. And there was something almost unabashedly pure in her character. While all of the regulars knew the importance of their jobs and the power they held, they were frequently cynical. Throughout the Sorkin era Donna always seemed to wake up every morning and feel just as blessed that she worked at the White House as she did the first day she joined the campaign.

Janel Moloney was one of two series regulars who never received the recognition from the Emmys that they deserved, the other being Dule Hill. I think the fundamental reason is the same for both: Donna and Charlie were so quietly good in their roles and frequently so unobtrusive in their excellence that their work rarely gave the opportunity for the kind of histrionic brilliance of all the other characters. They were great supporting characters, in short, because they provided support in so many ways to the rest of the cast and made them look good by comparison. And as a result both Hill and Moloney received only one Emmy nomination apiece during Sorkin’s tenure on the show (Moloney received one more after Sorkin resigned) while their co-stars were winning every year.

But few would argue that Donna is the most beloved character in the entire West Wing universe because of how wonderful she was at that. And I think the best way to show this is to demonstrate her body of work during the second season when she became a series regular.

In the season premiere ‘In The Shadow of Two Gunmen’, the episode opens in the aftermath of the attempt on Bartlet’s life. The President has been shot but looks like he’ll recover – but Josh has taken a bullet in the chest. Donna gets to GW after most of the other staffers without learning the news and the first thing she does is ask after the President. She’s thrilled to learn he’s going to be fine – and only then does Toby tell her about Josh’s condition.

In flashbacks we learn how the administration was formed and how every regular joined the campaign. After Bartlet’s third place finish in Iowa, the team is about to go to South Carolina. Josh is going to his desk and there he meets a timid student who has dropped out of the University of Wisconsin. Josh spends a lot of time lecturing her before he learns about her relationship with her ex-boyfriend. He tells her: “This is a campaign for the Presidency. This can’t be a place where people come to find their confidence and start over.” For the first time Donna punctures the balloon: “Why not? Why can’t it be those things?”

It's not clear if that penetrates but Josh tells her that if she’s serious they’re going to South Carolina. Almost as an afterthought he hands her a campaign ID. The stage direction in the screenplay say that Donna: “looks at it. It’s the first piece of jewelry anyone’s ever given her.”

Throughout the second season Moloney constant demonstrates her brilliance most often when it comes to episodes that will win Emmys for her castmates. This is taken to two different extremes in two classic holiday episodes, both of which have gone down in history as the best series the show ever did.

The first is Shibboleth. During this episode, as any fan of The West Wing knows, CJ is handed the burden of having to decide which of two turkeys is more photogenic to get a Presidential pardon. Alison Janney deservedly won her second consecutive Emmy for Best Supporting Actress in a Drama for her work here which is one of the great comic performances, arguably, in television history.

Now as anyone who had watched The West Wing knows, to that point, Donna’s role was fundamentally to provide comic relief. Moloney does some of her best work in the series by playing, for one of the few times in the show’s history, the straight man (or woman). After CJ realizes there are turkeys in her office, Donna runs quickly to explain what’s going on.

Donna: The turkeys came.

CJ: I saw that.

After the explanation about the pardoning of the turkey:

CJ: Why are they’re two?”

Donna: Traditionally the press secretary chooses the more photogenic.

CJ: NO!

(Pause)

Donna: Their names…

CJ: “I don’t want to know their names.

(Another pause)

Donna: This one’s Eric and this one’s Troy.

CJ: Eric and Troy. And I’m to choose the more photogenic to receive a Presidential pardon.

Donna: Right.

CJ: OK, I actually have a masters in political science from the University of California at Berkeley.

Donna: ‘That’s a good school.”

(pause)

Donna: “They eat grain…or whatever’s lying around. And Troy doesn’t like to be touched.”

(pause)

CJ: “Okay, I’d like to be alone now.”

Moloney takes this with the same seriousness she does every task at the White House while Janney embodies the total ludicrous nature of the situation. This continues later on when CJ tells Donna that she needs to know the songs that she has lead the children in song “for I am the press secretary.”

Donna: It’s the usual song.

CJ: There’s a usual song?

Donna: “We Gather Together.”

CJ: “You know the song.”

Donna: “Everyone knows the song.

CJ: “I don’t know the song.

Donna becomes slightly incredulous here:

Donna: Didn’t you go to kindergarten?

CJ: Yes, right before becoming a National Merit Scholar!

Donna, of course, offers to help her but CJ has you know important stuff to do and that of course is figure out which turkey to pardon. (I will deal with that in another article, this is about Donna.) After that she tries to get the turkey into the cage.

Donna: You have to support its hindquarters.

Donna, of course, is just trying to be helpful.

CJ: Well, I don’t know where they are and I’m not going to look that hard!

The final five minutes, of course, any West Wing fan can quote from memory, particularly CJ and Bartlet’s banter about how Morton Horn doesn’t know that the President can’t pardon a turkey. Of course when he does so and Bartlet gives it away Dona’s reply of “You can’t pardon a turkey?” is incredible because she sounds like someone just learning there is no Santa. It is the one time she is, well, Donna.

But there is far less fun to be found in ‘Noel’, the extraordinary Christmas episode for which Bradley Whitford deservedly won the Emmy for Best Supporting Actor in a Drama. During Season 2 Josh has recovered from the physical effects of his shooting but in subtle ways ever since he returned to work has been demonstrating that he’s clearly dealing with emotional trauma.

In hindsight, it’s clear that some of it came out through the way he has been treating Donna. In the first season, he was compassionate and while he teased her occasionally it was always in good fun. Since he returned to work, that teasing has taken on a cruel nature. One key example comes in ‘The Portland Trip’. Dona is about to go on a date with someone called Tod and Josh says he’ll need her back in an hour. “If you wanna have sex, you better do it during dinner,” he says almost casually.

Because Donna returns to the White House right on schedule and because she engages in bizarre chats, including whether new staffer Ainsley Hayes is dying her hair (the subtext being she thinks the two of them look alike and is concerned Josh finds Ainsley attractive) we don’t realize how cold and heartless Josh sounded to his secretary. There are a lot of other arguments going on before and after this episode, and after awhile it becomes clear that Donna and Josh are not in sync the way they used to be. Josh has not realized this. Donna has.

In Noel we see much of their interactions through flashback and its clear Donna is doing everything she can to anticipate Josh’s every need. When he asks for a file on a pilot who crashed his plane into a wall, she gives it to him before he even asks for it. She also goes out of her way to provide her usual comic relief, with a Dona like obsession with the White House Christmas music (“Yo-Yo Ma rules!” she says at one point.)  All of this is less noticeable because the episode is focused on how Josh cut his hand and the revelation that he has been dealing with the reality of his trauma. (I’ll deal with that in my article on Whitford.)

At the end of the episode when Josh confides to Leo about what happened to him and that Leo assures him that he’ll always have a job in the White House, Leo says Donna’s gonna go with him to the hospital to have his hand looked at.

“She knows?” Josh says, surprised.”

“She was the one who guessed,” Leo tells him

The last shot of the episode shows Donna taking Josh to a hospital. “I don’t need a doctor,” he grouses. “Are you a doctor?” Donna says gently. Josh walks by some Christmas carolers who are singing the Carol of the Bells. We already know this is a trigger for him. He pauses for a long moment and then Donna walks up to him. Slowly the two of them walk away and we get the first real hint Josh will be okay.

Rob Lowe received the only Emmy nomination he would for the series that same year, for another classic episode: “Somebody’s Going to Emergency, Somebody’s Going to Jail.” Sam is dealing with the fact that his father has just confessed to him that he’s been having an affair with another woman for thirty years. While this is going on, the White House is having “Big Block of Cheese Day.” As we know already this is the day when the White House opens it doors to ‘crackpots’. This usually provides high comedy. For Sam, it’s a descent into hell.

A friend of Donna’s from college, Stephanie Gault, has come to the White House. Her grandfather was Daniel Gault, a special economic assistant to FDR who was jailed for perjury under HUAC and died six months later. Stephanie has come to request that Sam look to see if there is a possibility for a retroactive pardon for him. Stephanie father has requested Gault’s FBI file under the FOIA in the 1970s and a judge ruled it violated national security.

Sam believed for much of his life that the case against Gault was a travesty of justice. However Nancy McNally, the National Security Adviser, tells Sam to drop it and gives Sam Gault’s NSA file to look at it. He learns that Gault was indeed a spy and returned to the US by way of Moscow when he was given the Order of Lenin. He had been recruited in the early 1930s and revealed among other things Roosevelt’s plans to enter the war and our position at Yalta.

At the end of the episode Donna goes to see Sam, who tells her everything he’s learned – and his plans to reveal the truth to Stephanie. Donna panics and tells him not to say anything. “It was fifty years ago. What does it matter?”

Sam erupts in a rage:

“It was high treason and it mattered a great deal. This country is an idea and one that’s lit the world for two centuries. Treason against that idea is not just a crime against the living. This grounds hold the graves of people who died for it. Who gave what Lincoln said was the last brave measure of devotion.’

Then he swallows. “Of fidelity.”

Then he tells Donna that Gault was responsible for the death of a translator who was murdered when she was about to reveal the identity of an agent called Blackwater. Then he says: “This girl’s going to know who her father was.”

Donna interrupts him and says gently: “Sam. You mean grandfather.” She clearly knows what this is really about. It doesn’t seem like it registers immediately – Sam begins his talk with Stephanie by mentioning the translator but then he looks at Donna and tells her he couldn’t find anything. Stephanie takes this as a positive and she walks away.

Sam and Donna rarely interacted during the series (Sam has his own secretary) and Sorkin’s decision to have the two of them have this scene together resonated with Lowe at the time. By this point it was expected that if Sam would go to anyone first for comfort it would be CJ (the two of them were always close) By having Donna be the one to talk him down and console him afterwards was a brilliant call by Sorkin, precisely because she delivers a line after his despair that is a perfect joke. (Outside the context of the episode it doesn’t make sense so I won’t reveal it.)

Donna was always there for everybody and she had a sense of compassion that almost no one else on The West Wing had. Perhaps that is best revealed in the penultimate episode when the decision to reveal Bartlet’s MS is about to be made and Toby goes to Donna to make sure she knows about it ahead of the other secretaries – including critically Mrs. Landingham.

Donna takes in and unlike everyone else who’s learned about it to this point – including, most critically, Toby – she nods and asks if the President’s okay. Toby actually seems shocked by this and answers yes. She doesn’t ask any follow-up questions, thanks Toby and goes back to work. Josh asks Toby how she took it and Toby’s response is telling:

“If the rest of the country handles it as well as she did we may be okay.”

Then he paused. “It wouldn’t hurt if people around here handled it as well as she did.” And he makes clear he includes himself as one of them.

Janel Moloney was a complete unknown when she was cast on The West Wing and had it not been for one scene she did on Sports Night she would never have been cast as Donna. Unlike almost every major actor who starred on The West Wing she has done almost no acting in the nearly two decades since The West Wing ended. She made one-episode roles on shows such as House and The Good Wife, but she has done very little recurring roles since then. Her biggest role was as Mary Jamison, the wife of Christopher Eccleston’s character – and tellingly in the majority of these episodes she was in a wheelchair unable to move or speak. She had a larger role in the third season of the brilliant American Crime and made two appearance in The Undoing in 2020. Her last acting role of any kind was a recurring role on the second season of Law & Order: Organized Crime in 2022.

Why Moloney has essentially chosen to withdraw from acting is a question that I have asked myself constantly on the rare occasions I see her in a guest role on TV in the last seventeen years. She was only 37 when the show ended, far younger then most of her co-stars who by this point have each done at least one series in which they were regulars. (Janney alone  did two shows this year.) Considering that the number of great roles for actresses on TV have exploded when the show ended in 2006 there’s any number of great roles she could have played as a lead or supporting and I’m sure any one of her co-stars would have been willing to have a role written for her had she only asked.

Why has she walked always from the business? Perhaps Moloney, like the character who has been locked in our consciousness since she first timidly brought Josh coffee, never felt the need to be part of the spotlight. She had her moment in the sun, she served at the pleasure of the nation and now she is fine to go back into relative obscurity. The nation will always need Donna Moss’s more than they may need us. We should be lucky we got the one and that Moloney blessed us by playing her.