OnlyFans dramedy Margo's Got Money Troubles is a blast

Pity the poor Gen Z-er. They were promised the world, but ended up with high prices, an endless culture war, and a generation of elders mocking them. It’s a wonder any of them have the energy to get up and fight in the morning. Enter Margo (Elle Fanning), your typical Gen Z-er with dreams bigger than her reach. An only child of a Hooters waitress (played by Michelle Pfeiffer) and an ex-pro-wrestler (portrayed by Nick Offerman), she hoped to find a route out of her working-class circumstances through higher education. But “avoiding reality by rewriting it” comes with a major pitfall when she’s impregnated by her skeezy English professor, Mark (Michael Anganaro.) Choosing to keep the baby, Margo is forced to drop out of school and find a way to pay off the mounting bills of motherhood. What’s a fabulist of the 2020s to do? How does an OnlyFans account sound?

Rufi Thorpe’s 2024 novel is one of the better books about Gen-Z malaise, taking on its quirky setup with the sardonic empathy typical of that generation: optimistic despite the burning hellscape of its surroundings. On the page and the screen, Margo’s Got Money Troubles, which was created by David E. Kelley, is sparky, funny, and just mad enough without letting its heroine and her circumstances slide into parody. This isn’t just the story of a young woman’s issues, after all; it’s one steeped in the intersections of class, sex, and capitalism. It could have been a moralizing nightmare. Mercifully, it’s actually a blast.

Fresh off her first Oscar nomination, Fanning is a great fit for Margo, a smart but naive woman who feels lived-in . She’s always exceeded in roles like this, where her baby-faced warmth is forced to give way to the harsh realities of society; and with Margo, her oft-underused comic timing gets room to shine. Margo enters the world of sex work pretty tamely. She keeps things text-based, with a laugh-out-loud offer to insultingly compare her customers’ genitals to Pokémon characters. But you’ve gotta have a gimmick, and Margo takes inspiration from her parents’ careers and her own writerly desires. It’s patently ridiculous, but also not that hard to imagine subscribers signing up in droves to witness her. There’s a lid for every pot.

It’s a relief to note that Margo’s Got Money Troubles threads a fine needle, tacking depictions of sex work with panache. This is not Margo’s dream career, of course, and her mother, who is trying to atone to her family for her own past errors, cannot help but wish for better than this for her daughter. But the series never shames her for it or makes it seem like the rock-bottom end of her life. It’s just a job, albeit one with wrestling leotards and alien subplots.