The + Effects of TV (on your Soul)

JOSH takes off his laminated ID tag on a chain that hangs around his neck and hands it to DONNA.

DONNA
(into phone)
Uh, yes...yes...yes.

DONNA holds the tag in her hand, trying not to show that it's the first piece of jewelry anyone's ever given her.

I'm reading television scripts again, but with the West Wing scripts instead. When I reached this quote from the second part of "In The Shadow of Two Gunmen," the season two premiere, I had to put the book down and sigh happily. This is what I meant in my last post about stage directions providing insight into characters. It's a small moment on screen, and a sweet one, that says quite a bit about Josh and Donna's relationship. This is from a flashback scene where they meet for the first time, and the rapport that made them such a popular part of the series exists already.

Here's a quote from the season two finale, "Two Cathedrals," that encompasses a much bigger moment on the show, the funeral of Dolores Landingham:

And during this we see that all of our friends are here. LEO, SAM, TOBY, C.J., DONNA, JOSH, BONNIE, GINGER, MARGARET, CAROL...with everything that's been going on, this is going to serve as a sacred 90 minutes. They obviously never had the relationship with her that Bartlet or even Leo did, but she was a friend of theirs and they worked in a foxhole and this is probably the only time they're given to come to terms that she's in that box.

One paragraph, and particularly the last sentence of it, perfectly encapsulates Mrs. Landingham's funeral. It's an admirable economy of words for a man with a reputation for being so prolific.