I promise, it’s the title that drew me in. Margo’s Got Money Troubles is a new Apple TV show (out Wednesday), starring Elle Fanning as a single mum who becomes an OnlyFans model. It joins a niche canon of similarly blunt titles about generic obstacles. To wit: Fleishman Is in Trouble; Big Trouble in Little China. Margo’s Got Money Troubles is better, though. Check out the assonance, the rhythm. It has great mouthfeel, to borrow a word from food reviewing, one I instantly regret.
Our hero, Margo Millet, is a first-year college student who falls pregnant by her professor. The married academic tells her to get an abortion; her friends agree with him. She has the baby. She drops out of college, falls into money troubles. She attempts to fall out of them by joining the notorious content creation platform. She does nude video shoots, in the character of a sexy alien. If none of this inflames you, can I interest you in Nick Offerman as Margo’s pro-wrestler, drug-addicted father? Or Michelle Pfeiffer as her blue collar, ex-Hooters-waitress mother? No? Are you dead?
OnlyFans represents the mainstreamification of sex work, which puts us in a new (yet also extremely old) moment of cultural reckoning. Is Margo a sex worker? Unfit mother? Is she pitiable? OnlyFans creators might make pocket change or millions depending on how savvy they are. (Has Lily Allen revealed the feet receipts?) Creators face a choice: keep their job secret or face difficult conversations. The show is too smart to resort to pat narratives, or assume judgment is easily assuaged. But it’s refreshingly pro-sex. “All sex work is art,” as one creator, played by rapper Rico Nasty, sermonises.
If the online world is a wild west, Margo is a prospector. The mechanics of how she gets ahead, what she has to show, are clearly a draw. And it is sexy; but the raunch is just the dressing. The show is at its best in its first trimester, broiling in the stigma of being a young, single mother. Friends can’t hide their frustration at Margo’s choice. Job interviews are sunk when the stroller rolls in. Margo’s college roommates have limited empathy for a crying baby keeping them up before exams. Especially as their lease won’t even permit them to own a dog.
As the show peels away layers, it reveals a grownup theme: respectability. Margo’s new career exposes the internet as a dangerous two-way portal, opening up money, fame and shame. The professor’s family are wealthy yet morally bankrupt. Offerman’s Jinx is a brittle addict who desperately needs the world to see he has reformed. Meanwhile Margo’s mother, Shyanne, former good time gal, has got engaged to a stultifyingly boring, respectable churchman. She writhes with ick, as he proposes with the words “I want to be the serious to your silly”. They’re all wrestling with something.
Come for the alien boobs, stay for the craft. Elle Fanning is an emotionally translucent performer, Oscar-nominated for Sentimental Value. (I enjoyed her most in Predator: Badlands. Underrated!) Offerman is heartbreaking here, acting in Lycra and against type. Greg Kinnear, as Shyanne’s fiance Kenny, once again cuts against his corn-fed, JFK handsomeness to play a milquetoast doofus with hidden depths. Is his career a private joke with himself? Then there’s Pfeiffer, who’s simply not human. Who looks like that?
She’s hilarious as Shyanne, the unwilling grandma who spends $400 a month on face cream and won’t hide her disappointment in her daughter. She’s unable to hold a baby without it screaming, and probably her too. “He’s deliberately quiet when you’re holding him, just to make me feel worse about myself,” she rails. Really, Shyanne wants her daughter to achieve things she herself was unable to. “I ruined your life,” says Margo tentatively, addressing her mother’s own one-night stand that led to her birth. “You ruined my life so pretty,” her mother replies, with a tender kiss.
This is a rugged frontier within feminism: the acceptance of deep ambivalence about motherhood. The show is as bold about such taboos as it is nuanced about women’s choices. And who doesn’t love that title – deliciously dry, while the show is anything but. I’m a fan. I won’t be the only one.