Apple Tv’s new series Margo's Got Money Troubles arrived this week with its first three episodes of eight, introducing Margo, a wide-eyed college student whose life changes when she becomes pregnant by her literature professor, Mark. He is married, has children and wants no lasting evidence that he slept with a student.
The show puts Elle Fanning at the center as Margo, with Nicole Kidman and Dakota Fanning among the executive producers on the A24-backed adaptation of Rufi Thorpe’s novel. David E. Kelley helmed the series, which also stars Nick Offerman, Michelle Pfeiffer and Greg Kinnear.
What gives the series its charge is not just the setup, but the way it moves Margo into adulthood on hard terms. She keeps the baby, Bodhi, drops out of school and struggles to find work. Her friends mostly drift away after the birth, except for Susie, while her estranged father, Jinx, is trying to recover from opioid addiction after a life as a former pro wrestler.
That is where the show turns. Margo begins making sexually suggestive content on OnlyFans with the help of two other creators, and the arrangement quickly brings trouble of its own. Lace steps in to help when the work starts causing problems, pushing the story beyond a simple tale of survival and into one about how a young mother tries to build something workable out of people who are barely holding themselves together.
Shyanne, Margo’s mother, is fighting her own battle too. A former Hooters waitress, she is in the process of sanitizing herself to appear worthy of her boyfriend, Kenny, a church leader. The series keeps folding those separate efforts into one uneasy household: a mother trying to be respectable, a daughter trying to earn money, a child at the center of it all and a circle of misfits who end up functioning as family.
That is the point of the adaptation. Margo's Got Money Troubles is not treating its premise as shock value. It is using it to show how a young woman, cut off from school and short on options, ends up relying on the one network that will still show up. With five episodes still to come, the question is not whether Margo’s choices are tidy. It is whether this ragtag family can hold together long enough to let her keep Bodhi and keep going.
