Margo’s Got Money Troubles has an impeachable creative-team pedigree, courtesy of a cast led by Elle Fanning, Michelle Pfeiffer, Nick Offerman, and Nicole Kidman, and a showrunner in David E. Kelley (Big Little Lies, Ally McBeal) whose resumé is chock full of genre-defining TV hits. Moreover, its premise—a young single mom takes to OnlyFans to pay the bills—is practically designed to elicit grabby headlines and, with them, viewers eager to see how far it’s willing to push risqué boundaries.
The answer, it turns out, isn’t nearly far enough.
No matter the wannabe-titillating nature of its upbeat tale or its multiple strengths (sturdy performances, bright aesthetics, big heart), Apple TV’s latest (April 15) is a frustratingly rigged game. Making arguments about parenthood, family, and pornography that only work because its every detail has been carefully engineered to eschew reality, Kelly’s new series (based on Rufi Thorpe’s novel of the same name) is a feel-good story that’s predicated on, and sabotaged by, its fairy-tale fantasy.
Margo (Fanning) is a freshman at California’s Fullerton College. Her path is forever altered by her English Literature professor, Mark (Michael Angarano), whose praise of her writing is just a means of getting her into bed. Even though Margo knows Mark is married with children, they begin an affair.
“You’re too smart for this,” says Margo’s NYU friend Becca (Sasha Diamond). Yet she’s not, ostensibly thanks to the examples set by a mother, Shyanne (Pfeiffer), who raised her kid while waitressing at Hooters, and a father, Jinx (Offerman), who largely abandoned her in favor of his once-famous WWE wrestling career and a whole lot of substance abuse.
Margo’s clichéd tryst with her teacher leads to another familiar scenario when she becomes pregnant. Despite the fact that keeping the baby will blow up her life, Margo opts to do just that, all as her dad, fresh out of rehab, appears on her doorstep looking for a second chance and a place to stay.
Pfeiffer’s Shyanne—having also been a single mother and now engaged to devout Christian Kenny (Greg Kinnear), who’s apt to frown on being the stepfather to a girl having a kid out of wedlock—is less than thrilled with Margo’s decision. Still, Margo remains undeterred and has the baby, whose presence sends two of her roommates fleeing their apartment—leaving merely loyal cosplayer friend Susie (Thaddea Graham) to help out—and creates financial costs she can’t shoulder.
Her solution? Porn! Or, rather, OnlyFans, which Margo learns is an easy way to make a living at home so long as you’re willing to indulge in kinkiness and show some skin.
Margo’s Got Money Troubles doesn’t shy away from the adult nature of the platform, but at every turn, it waters down what really takes place on it, with Margo netting initial tips from flashing her boobs and insulting fans’ genitals as Pokémon characters. Once she determines that she needs to partner with professionals, she befriends KC (Rico Nasty) and Rose (Lindsey Normington), local OnlyFans experts who are astounded that she hasn’t put everything on camera (after all, “the vagina is nature’s piggybank”) and who welcome her into their clique after she convinces them that she intends to produce groundbreaking online material.
Throughout the series, Margo is harshly judged and decried for her new vocation, and she responds by mounting defenses that are true to the specifics of her circumstances. The problem, however, is that those specifics don’t jibe with the actual OnlyFans or its success stories. Simply put, the series contends that, beneath their tawdry surfaces, these dysfunctional misfits and outcasts are fundamentally good and admirable people, yet the means by which it does this—namely, by sidestepping the truth about OnlyFans and by forgiving the numerous legitimate and alarming failures of its characters—is disingenuous.
Margo’s Got Money Troubles might have made this work by leaning into rollicking comedy. As a pathos-courting dramedy, though, it resounds as phony, especially in later episodes, which underscore that Mark—who eventually petitions for full custody of his son due to Margo’s profession, and who’s positioned as the clear-cut bad guy—makes some valid points.
By wanting us to root for Margo as a human being (rather than as a funny caricature), Kelley gets tangled up in a moral thicket that offsets both the material’s bouncy, colorful tone and headlining turns that are more nuanced than the writing at hand.
Fanning, Pfeiffer, and Offerman are all empathetically screwy in Margo’s Got Money Troubles, and as Jinx’s long-time wrestling colleague, Lace—who’s also, conveniently, a lawyer—Kidman reconfirms that there isn’t a wild TV character she isn’t willing to play.
They’re all so good that it’s often easy to go along with the series’ compassionate celebration of fringe-dwellers banding together to triumph over daunting odds, and its absolution of their myriad self-inflicted wounds. Still, the show has a wearisome habit of raising legitimate criticisms of its protagonists and then manufacturing contrived ways to dispel them, culminating with the most far-fetched custody courtroom hearing in television history.
No one’s looking for Margo’s Got Money Troubles to be a hard-hitting exposé about 21st-century adult entertainment, single motherhood, and it-takes-a-village camaraderie. But the show gets caught in a wishy-washy purgatory between seriousness and silliness.
Whether it’s Susie’s fandom of Jinx, Shyanne’s tense relationship with Kenny, or Mark’s dragon lady mother Elizabeth (Marcia Gay Harden, sporting a Cruella de Vil white streak in her hair), everything is sketchily conceived and too cutesy to warrant sincere emotional engagement, and by its midway point, most of it revolves around Fanning’s Margo looking upset and put-upon as she endeavors to put out various fires of her own (and her family’s) making.
Margo’s Got Money Troubles leaves enough loose threads to suggest that it has designs to be a multi-season affair. With so little heft or humor to this saga, however, it would take a miracle—on par with, say, someone supporting a family on tame, lousy OnlyFans sci-fi videos—for Kelley to devise a reason for prolonging his heroine’s cash-flow woes.
