TV is having a bit of an OnlyFans moment. The online platform, not always but often used for N.S.F.W. exhibitionistic content, has been a plot point in “Industry” and “Euphoria,” was a sideline for some subjects of the docuseries “Neighbors” and is now central to a new Apple TV dramedy, “Margo’s Got Money Troubles.”
Judging by TV’s past explorations of sex work — “The Deuce,” “P-Valley,” “The Girlfriend Experience” — you might expect a series about a protagonist’s online-exhibitionism career to be provocative, dark, maybe spicy. But would you believe … sweet?
That’s precisely what you get from “Margo,” which debuted on Wednesday. It is as empathetic, funny and openhearted a series about an adult performer monetizing her exposure on the internet as you might expect to see.
Margo (Elle Fanning), a brilliant student languishing at her hometown California college, falls into an affair with Mark (Michael Angarano), a married professor who leaves her pregnant. She turns to her mother, Shyanne (Michelle Pfeiffer), a former Hooters waitress who herself raised Margo alone. Now trying for a new start with her square, religious fiancé, Kenny (Greg Kinnear), Shyanne offers help but with a warning: “You won’t read that in those ‘What to Expect When You’re Expecting’ books, but this will break you.”
Margo may not be broken, but she is soon broke, exhausted and bombing job interviews with her infant son, Bodhi, in tow. On the suggestion of her roommate, Susie (Thaddea Graham), a cosplay enthusiast, she investigates online modeling as a way out.
For Margo, an aspiring writer before her schooling was derailed, posing for subscriptions and tips doesn’t just pay the bills; it’s the creative outlet she’s been missing. She assumes a character — Hungry Ghost, a libidinous alien — and her first venture involves getting men to pay her to compare pictures of their penises to Pokémon characters. Eventually, she collaborates with KC (Rico Nasty) and Rose (Lindsey Normington), a pair of veteran models who become her tutors.
Her new career is aided, and complicated, by the arrival of her absentee father, Jinx (Nick Offerman), a former professional wrestler emerging from opioid rehab. Jinx proves to be not only a handy babysitter — Offerman is in prime cuddly-lumberjack mode here — but also, eventually, a kind of professional consultant.
Pro wrestling, after all, is also a career of spectacle and persona-creation, of role play and self-invention and narrative spinning. And both jobs, “Margo” is ever-aware, are work. They require focus, discipline and attention to one’s brand. (There is a great deal of discussion about the timing and rollout of Hungry Ghost’s “vag debut.”) Online performance has its particular risks, including public exposure, physical threats and social stigma, and those weigh more heavily on Margo as the eight-episode season goes on.
“Margo,” based on the 2024 novel by Rufi Thorpe, was adapted for television by the prolific TV producer David E. Kelley, a fact that, I admit, gave me pause. Kelley has made a late-career specialty of adaptations, including “Big Little Lies,” but those of us who remember “Ally McBeal” know that he has a penchant for quirk that could push a story like this into silliness.
Instead, “Margo” balances warmth, offbeat comedy and porno-populism, abetted by a top-to-bottom outstanding cast. Fanning channels stress, anger and the exhaustion of new motherhood without losing Margo’s indomitable spirit. And Pfeiffer (starring for the first time in a show by Kelley, her husband) gives Shyanne a proud fire that suggests a lifetime as a survivor. The relationship between Margo and her mother, combative and intimate, is the show’s engine.
What’s most impressive about “Margo,” given the subject matter, is how broad-minded it is in every direction. You may not like everything any character does or says, but “Margo” doesn’t allow you to feel superior to them, be they the online performers or the stiff but well-meaning Kenny. Everyone is granted some measure of nuance. (Well, almost everyone — Mark’s mother, played by Marcia Gay Harden, is written as an icy soap-opera villainess.)
That’s not to say that understanding comes easily. Jinx, used to being stigmatized for his drug addiction, is initially horrified by Margo’s work. So is Shyanne, though you get the sense that her reaction — like her disappointment at Margo’s pregnancy — is born of her own hard experience being looked down on.
For that matter, Margo herself betrays some ambivalence about what she does to pay the rent, even as she defends her right to do it. She repeatedly pushes back on the idea that what’s she’s doing is sex work or pornography, which might be a semantic point. But it also, Rose suggests, connotes a measure of “internalized whorephobia.”
Ultimately, “Margo” is a show less about sex and skin than about social and class prejudice. Who is considered entitled to respect and to grace? Who is allowed to make mistakes and to come back from them?
“Margo” is not shy about yanking on your emotions to make its points. It pulls heartstrings expertly and leans into the “dra-” side of “dramedy” as the season comes to a close. A courtroom showdown — Kelley returning to his old legal stamping grounds — plays out as a shameless network-TV Solomonic justice fantasy, and I minded not one bit.
It all amounts to an old-school humanist message wrapped up in a winsome Internet Era package. There is plenty of skin, actual and implied, in “Margo’s Got Money Troubles.” But the body part it most wants to show you is its heart.
James Poniewozik is the chief TV critic for The Times. He writes reviews and essays with an emphasis on television as it reflects a changing culture and politics.
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