Margo’s Got Money Troubles review – Elle Fanning comedy drama about OnlyFans and motherhood is five-star TV

Michelle Pfeiffer, Nick Offerman and Nicole Kidman round out the cast of this warm, comforting Apple TV show
If OnlyFans has taught us a lesson, it’s that there’s nothing the internet will not monetise.

David E Kelley – creator of Ally McBeal and Big Little Lies – has taken that as a loose premise and fashioned something not only full of pathos, but free of judgement.

Margo’s Got Money Troubles , adapted from Rufi Thorpe’s 2024 novel and streaming now on Apple TV, drops us into the sun-baked, precarious milieu of working-class Fullerton, California, where a literary student’s ill-fated affair with her married professor has left her broke, single and literally holding the baby.

Salvation, of a sort, arrives in two forms: said college dropout, Margo ( Elle Fanning ), creates a green-skinned alien OnlyFans persona that starts generating serious money; and her father Jinx (Nick Offerman) unexpectedly reappears, fresh out of rehab and desperate to make amends.

No one is cutting Margo any slack.

Prams aren’t welcome at job interviews.

Friends can’t conceal their irritation at her choices.

And when the professor’s family – represented by Marcia Gay Harden’s icy mother – re-enters the picture wielding an NDA, the show’s class warfare comes firmly into focus.

Carrying it all is Fanning, whose performance as Margo – warm, funny, emotionally precise – makes the role look considerably easier than it is.

A hilarious mother-daughter dynamic is dependent on Michelle Pfeiffer (wife of Kelley for more than three decades), who delivers on every nuance as Shyanne, the reluctant grandmother who spends $400 a month on face cream and can’t hold a baby without it crying.

She’s also heartbreaking in the same breath, such is the way, without saying a word, Shyanne watches her daughter’s future slowly dissolve during the baby shower.

“You chose to keep me.

I ruined your life,” laments Margo.

“You ruined my life so pretty,” her mother replies.

Greg Kinnear, as Shyanne’s heroically dull churchman fiancé, is the perfect comic foil; Nicole Kidman, as a former wrestler-turned-attorney hired to represent Margo in the ensuing custody battle, brings a brisk, no-nonsense competence that sits in contrast with the chaos swirling around her.

Just as The Last of Us deployed Offerman as a survivalist whose gruff self-sufficiency was the thinnest armour over a wholly loving heart, so Margo’s Got Money Troubles lets him show us a man whose armour has already been stripped away.

As Jinx – recovering addict, ex-pro-wrestler, absentee father returned – Offerman commits, again, to a flawed individual with good intentions.

There is grief etched here in every crag and crease of his face.

It’s compelling.

Neither prurient nor mawkish, this eight-part series is honest but non-didactic about the ambivalences of child-rearing, and droll about the exploitative ramifications of sex work.

Margo’s alien online alter ego, HungryGhost, is treated less as a source of titillation than an outlet for creative ingenuity, a writing fillip this young mother needs after being forced to leave college.

The show also eschews the poverty-porn trap entirely, finding comedy in the indignities of early motherhood without condescension.

Ultimately, these are characters for whom it’s impossible not to root.

As such, Margo’s Got Money Troubles has the pleasing smack of comfort television.

Curveballs are met.

Disaster is dodged.

An unlikely resourcefulness prevails.

The internet, as Margo finds, contains multitudes.

So does this.

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