The rights to adapt Rufi Thorpe’s novel Margo’s Got Money Troubles for TV were snapped up nearly a year before its publication, with Nicole Kidman, David E. Kelley, Elle and Dakota Fanning, and the swaggering indie studio A24 all attached to the project. Read the book, and you’ll see why. It tells the story of a college freshman and aspiring writer who gets pregnant by her married professor, decides to have the baby—financial precarity be damned—and turns to OnlyFans to support the child. Maybe this sounds like an X-rated Juno ripoff. But Thorpe’s prose ushers us through the eponymous hero’s crises with humor and panache, filtering the bright but naive protagonist-Margo’s evolution through the voice of a narrator-Margo who has developed some perspective. She’s surrounded by distinctive, lovable yet deeply flawed characters. The dialogue is as realistic as it is punchy. It all adds up to an unconventional sort of Künstlerroman that demands to be devoured in a weekend and revisited whenever you need a pick-me-up.
But just because a book is an obvious choice for adaptation, doesn’t mean that the show will live up to its source material. Margo’s layered voice presents a challenge; the novel-to-series pipeline often relies too heavily on clunky, uncinematic narration. Thorpe’s characters are so specific, their balance of prickliness and kindness and quirk so delicate, that one wrong casting choice could ruin the whole viewing experience. And it takes a certain offbeat finesse to integrate Margo’s far-out OnlyFans productions—which become a more satisfying creative outlet than any freshman comp seminar—into what is otherwise a grounded family dramedy. I’ve been extremely critical of Kelley’s prolific post-Big Little Lies output. So let me be very clear that with Margo, whose first three episodes hit Apple TV on Wednesday, he has succeeded where many other creators might’ve failed. It’s an ideal adaptation and one of the year’s best shows.
The cast could not be better. Elle Fanning brings to the title role a mix of intelligence, innocence, and grit similar to her interpretation of another tricky character: The Great’s young Catherine. A promising student whose lack of funds has her languishing at a hometown community college in the shabby sprawl outside Los Angeles, Margo Millet insists on living by instinct rather than conventional wisdom. Her capriciousness leads her into an affair with a frustrated professor, Mark (Michael Angarano), who compliments her writing and composes pretentious, backhandedly insulting poems about their not-quite-love. When she starts throwing up at her job, waiting tables at a cheesy Italian restaurant, Margo discovers she’s pregnant. Her decision to become a teen mom is made not just over the objections of Mark and her own mother, Shyanne (Michelle Pfeiffer), but in deliberate defiance of them. There’s nothing a precocious young person hates more than being told her elders know better—even when it’s true.
Shyanne has good reason to despair. She was a Hooters waitress when she hooked up with Margo’s dad—a pro wrestler known as Jinx (Nick Offerman), who was, like Mark, already married with kids—and suffered through many rough years of single parenthood. Now, she has a job at Bloomingdale’s, a cozy home, and a dweeby but dependable, adoring boyfriend in Kenny (Greg Kinnear), whose youth-pastor lifestyle the fiery Shyanne is determined to integrate herself into. A kid in college with the potential to do great things was supposed to be the final chapter of her happily-ever-after. Instead, she sees her daughter repeating the mistakes she made, except younger and with more talent to waste. (“I’m just terrible at everything except being pretty,” she laments.) Shyanne loves Margo too fiercely not to support her. But her pained expression at a baby shower she’d hoped would come much later betrays her disappointment.
Margo thrives on the mutually adoring and exasperated chemistry between Fanning’s brash but brilliant young woman and Pfeiffer’s mature matriarch, whose toughness and longing for stability are byproducts of 18 years spent struggling to keep Margo carefree. By Episode 2, baby Bodhi is born. As it dawns on Margo that she’s put herself in an impossible situation, a proverbial village amasses around her. Fresh out of rehab, Jinx appears, resolving with Offermanian gallantry to be a better grandpa than he was a dad. But in his retirement, with an addiction to fight and a divorce that left him with no other home to return to, he might need his second family more than they need him. Margo’s geeky roommate Susie (Thaddea Graham, recently delightful in Bad Sisters and Sex Education) happens to be a cosplay-loving Jinx stan. This comes in handy when the OnlyFans plot gets rolling, and Margo links up with a pair of high-earning, cyber-surrealist camgirls played by Anora standout Lindsey Normington and rapper Rico Nasty.
Even with the right cast and script, this storyline could have been ruinous, its big personalities and B-movie chic and naked boobs with the word boobs scrolled across them hijacking the more crucial but less flashy family arc. Kelley was smart to spend a few episodes establishing the latter before introducing these elements. When he does, we see how the videos, enhanced by Susie’s costume expertise and Jinx’s fight choreography, are more outsider art than self-exploitation. Margo paints her skin alien blue, dons an orange bouffant wig and skimpy silver ensemble, and names her character Hungry Ghost, reclaiming an allusion from one of Mark’s purple poems. In wrestling terms, Ghost plays the babyface ingenue to her more jaded collaborators’ heels. Which is also sort of who she is in life: a hot weirdo stumbling around a world she hasn’t inhabited for long enough to understand. A breathtaking scene has a giant Ghost peering into a movie theater, her face filling its giant screen. In another, she discovers Sun Chips and makes a powder-cheese mess of herself. It’s rare to see TV capture the appeal of fictional content creators, but I never doubted that this marriage of retro-futurist aesthetics and of-the-moment TikTok humor would find an audience beyond softcore devotees.
As in the novel, this genuinely inspiring fusion of art, sex, and commerce coalesces with the comedy and pathos of a dysfunctional but loving family to form a coming-of-age tale that’s as singular and irresistible as Margo. The unifying elements are youthful boldness, boundless energy, unconditional love, the universal desire for self-determination, and the tiniest drop of working-class rage. Joy is heaped high in this show, but its sweetness never turns saccharine. When we see Margo belting out “Angel of the Morning” in the car with Shyanne or blissfully cuddling Bodhi while Susie applies her body paint, that isn’t the show shrugging off the estimable burden of teen parenthood; she faces plenty of daunting challenges, too, in her first year as a mom. (Some of them facilitate hilarious turns from Kidman and Marcia Gay Harden.) Those moments are a rare reminder that pleasure and fulfillment can coexist with adversity.
In that respect, form follows content. Margo’s Got Money Troubles is a tightly constructed tale of a messy but resolute young woman bending apparently bad decisions to her advantage and an easy-to-love romp about learning life lessons the hard way. Robyn could be speaking as Margo when she tells her own little boy, in the song that soundtracks the show’s beguiling sci-fi-pinball credit sequence, that despite all the sacrifice motherhood demands, “I’m still having fun.”
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