Elle Fanning is fantastic in OnlyFans comedy 'Margo's Got Money Troubles'

Margo has gotten knocked up. She is a bright college student—played by the effervescent Elle Fanning—and while she has actual potential as a writer, she also possesses the romantic recklessness that is said to characterise the profession, and tumbles into the most ill-advised of affairs. Giddy on the feeble poetry of a married professor, she allows him to make her sigh, and ends up very pregnant. Her mother Shyanne, herself a single mom who had Margo after a tryst with a pro-wrestler, strongly advises against having the baby, describing how completely it will wreck everything.

“I ruined your life,” Margo wails at her. She knows she wants the baby and is all too aware that she may be repeating her mother’s mistake, but so be it. Margo’s Got Money Troubles—a wonderful new Apple TV series based on Rufi Thorpe’s novel of the same name—is a series full of unexpected responses, and her mother offers up a fantastic one, honest enough not to disagree while insightful enough to underline what matters: “You ruined my life so pretty.”

As mothers go, Shyanne is a piece of work. A former Hooters waitress who spends most of her savings on make-up and surgeries, she is played by the magnificent Michelle Pfeiffer as a broken and beautiful character, a white-trash Bukowski poem of a person who, in Margo’s words, has “the best legs in the history of the planet.” Shyanne is also, much like her daughter, self-flagellatingly clear about her own flaws. “I’m just terrible at everything,” she declares with a sigh, “except being pretty.”

Motherhood is an epic slog. Making ends meet gets increasingly difficult for Margo, unable to continue in college and desperate to fend for her little son Bodhi—whose name she pronounces to rhyme with “roadie”. The series graphically depicts her hardships: her body is sore, her baby won’t stop crying despite all the YouTube tutorials she watches, and she can’t make the hours for a waitressing job because there is nobody to watch Bodhi.

So she starts thinking of an OnlyFans account.

Thanks to her cosplaying roommate Susie (Thaddea Graham), Margot begins to wonder if she can, as a creative person, find a different stage on which to express herself. The idea of catering to a kinky audience feels icky at first, then intriguing, then incredible. In a world where we’re all performing for social media feeds, an OnlyFans account isn’t much of an overreach, and soon Margo is fizzing with wildly original ideas to make explicit content for consenting adults.

Then her dad shows up.

Jinx, played by Nick Offerman (of Parks and Recreation, and The Last of Us), is a retired wrestler freshly out of rehab. Nobody would choose him for a babysitter but Margo is all out of choices, and needs to believe in somebody. Offerman adds just enough grizzle to his baritone to create a “What if Randy Savage had a library card” voice, and be it him talking about “a pandemonium of parrots” or explaining that the point of painstakingly decorating a Christmas tree is to make each moment last forever, one can detect an unsaid “brother” or “dig it” at the end of his lines. Ooh yeah.

In Margo’s words, her father is “a fabulist”. In the show’s voiceover, Fanning talks about herself—mostly in the third person—demonstrating an impressive degree of ironic distancing and self-awareness. “The people in Margo’s life regard her as an unrelateable space alien,” she says about her pregnancy, and “the father of my child took a beat to check out my mother,” she complains about Shyanne’s gorgeousness. These could well be lines from the best-selling novel, but legendary showrunner David E. Kelley deploys them to excellent effect, and Fanning delivers them as effectively as elbow-drops from the top rope.

Fanning is a preternaturally gifted performer and one of the finest actors of her generation, easily evidenced by her work in A Sentimental Value, Neon Demon and The Great. She is fierce and fearless here, with her overwhelmingly sunny smile powering her character through miserably rough and dramatic circumstances. The entire ensemble is immediately compelling—Pfeiffer and Offerman are super, and Nicole Kidman’s first sighting made me gasp out loud—but this series really, and fittingly, is Fanning’s baby.

Margo’s Got Money Troubles is a touching series with fascinating characters and metaphors, and I was rooting hard for Margo through these eight episodes. This is a show where everybody has made mistakes, and everyone is more than we first suspect them of being. Several characters judge Margo for her OnlyFans choices, and even Margo ends up judgemental towards those who do… more than she does, at which point she is promptly told off by her professional collaborators: “Your internalised whorephobia is cute, but all sex-work is art.”

I have never really thought about the artfulness of pornography, but this is cleverly paralleled with the pageantry of pay-per-view pro-wrestling, a ludicrous make-believe world of scripted “sports entertainment” where grown men and women pretend to be good (faces) and evil (heels) and the audience, in turn, pretends to buy into the gimmick. Margo’s Got Money Troubles is simplistic in terms of who are the faces and who are the heels, yet it shows that all of them are just performers wearing make-up, struggling to get by.

Empathy is a choice. Believing is a choice. Doing better is a choice. To be knocked up is not the same as to be knocked out.

Streaming tip of the week:

The animated film GOAT (available for rent on Amazon Prime, AppleTV and BookMyShow Stream) tells the story of a goat who wants to become the greatest of all time at a basketball-esque sport. Smart, funny and goofy, this visually inventive ride features the voice of basketball legend Stephen Curry.

Raja Sen is a critic, screenwriter and columnist. His first play, a murder mystery called The Simla Affair, recently opened in Delhi. He is currently writing a horror film.