A little about the character she plays.
Don’t be confused by the outward confidence – Donna is driven by a fierce need for approval and acceptance. And most people can smell that a mile off, which means she gets neither love nor acceptance. Which makes her try that little bit too hard.
Her parents are in the middle of a toxic divorce, and they each use Donna to communicate their rage and disillusionment to the other. Donna’s father is a copper working night jobs to support the family; Donna’s mother has taken disappointment to a professional level. He lectures her; she has made a sport of outshining her, and each blames the other for what they perceive as Donna’s failings. Since early adolescence, she’s called them by their first names – it makes life easier if she thinks of them as badly behaved kids, not as her parents.
Donna's too competitive to have female friends; you can thank her mother for this. And she’s too out of control to have boyfriends. Who does that leave? No one really. So the music scene has become a home for her. And rising star Ty has become the focus of her heated dreams of love and acceptance. She can recite all the lyrics to all his songs – part of her thinks that he wrote them all for her.
This makes her sound like a train wreck. And it’s true – she’s brittle, awkward, and sometimes completely unscrupulous. But underneath that there’s a warm, vulnerable girl, loveable and charming and playful. She’s just seen too much disappointment to let anyone else know her.
I feel show ashamed for watching this show. But like all soap operas you grow to like the characters and want to find out what happens to them.