‘Margo’s Got Money Troubles’ Review: Elle Fanning in Apple Dramedy

Viewed from a great distance — like, say, the interstellar perspective of the UFO that descends upon Fullerton, California, in one of the protagonist’s fanciful sci-fi videos — Margo’s Got Money Troubles might appear at first like a venture into a strange and alien land.

The ensemble is stuffed with colorful job descriptions: former Hooters waitress (Michelle Pfeiffer’s Shyanne), ex pro wrestler (Nick Offerman’s Jinx), a trio of OnlyFans models. The opening narration, from Margo herself (Elle Fanning), tells of “impossible possibilities” and “trying to avoid reality by rewriting it.” All in all, the David E. Kelley series would seem to have all the hallmarks of an aggressively quirky family drama, the sort where everyone seems adorably odd but also not quite real.

Look closer, however, and Margo’s Got Money Troubles reveals itself to be something else. Its characters are memorable, sure, and their family relationships a bit unconventional. But this is a story firmly grounded in the real world, and all the more interesting for it.

While Margo is a head-in-the-clouds fabulist, the circumstances that kick off the Dearbhla Walsh-directed premiere are all too quotidian. During her freshman year at the local community college, Margo attracts the notice of an English professor, Mark (Michael Angarano), who’s a fan of her writing and an even bigger admirer of her long, shapely legs. Soon enough, they’re falling into bed together. A few months into their affair, Margo realizes she’s pregnant. Not long after that, Mark stops taking her calls.

Unable to attend school or hold down a job while raising Bodhi alone — to the bitter heartbreak of her mother (Pfeiffer), who herself had Margo while young and poor and single, and hoped her daughter might enjoy a brighter future — Margo finds herself in an impossible situation. But salvation arrives from two unexpected avenues.

One is the sudden appearance on her doorstep of Jinx, her semi-estranged father, who’s fresh out of rehab and in need of a place to stay. The other is Margo’s decision to start on OnlyFans account. With Jinx and their other roommate, a shy young cosplayer named Susie (Thaddea Graham), helping to watch Bodhi, Margo’s finally able to start making money from home.

Initially, Margo’s work is text-based — for a tip, she’ll tell you what Pokémon your dick resembles. Gradually, she expands into saucy photos and then videos, all the while insisting it’s less porn than art. For its part, Margo’s Got Money Troubles pushes back against characters who view this as disreputable or degrading, delighting in Margo’s satisfaction as she spins increasingly elaborate sci-fi plots to shoot with help from Susie, fellow models KC (musician Rico Nasty) and Rose (Anora’s Lindsey Normington) and even (for the SFW parts) Jinx. But the show’s own tendency to highlight the whimsical trappings of Margo’s work while downplaying its sexiness suggests Margo might not be the only one dealing with a bit of what Rose calls “internalized whorephobia.”

Still, it’s a minor discordant note in what is generally a thoughtful and endearing dramedy. Margo’s Got Money Troubles, based on the novel by Rufi Thorpe, appreciates what’s offbeat about these characters without treating them like oddities, empathizes with them without ever once pitying them. Fanning is typically winsome as Margo, maintaining the heroine’s spark of joy even as life throws her one dirty diaper and unpaid bill and legal issue after another.

But it’s her parents who really shine. Clad in skintight leopard and faux-fur trim, Shyanne is hardly a retiring personality. But Pfeiffer brings deep nuance to the character’s big feelings, such that she conveys an entire lifetime’s worth of emotion just by the way she watches Margo during her baby shower. As for Offerman, though he can be quite amusing as Jinx — the enthusiasm with which he explains wrestling moves or the plot of I, Claudius to an uncomprehending Bodhi is downright cute — he really excels at drawing out the character’s sadness, which runs so deep it seems to have settled into the very crevices of his face.

Along with Kenny (Greg Kinnear), Shyanne’s obliviously square fiancé, and Susie, who goes sadly underdeveloped despite Graham’s likable presence, Shyanne and Jinx and Margo form a family unit around Bodhi that feels all the stronger for how unexpected and complicated its bonds can be.

It’s a great pleasure to simply get to sit in with the crew as Margo and Shyanne bond and fight and make up again, in a pattern recognizable to mothers and daughters the world over, or as former lovers Jinx and Shyanne wistfully reminisce about their romantic history on the eve of her wedding. Though Margo’s Got Money Trouble is the rare show that feels just about the right length for the amount of story it has to tell, at eight 40-ish minute episodes, I still felt a bit sorry to see them go at season’s end.

Inevitably, the fact that this unorthodox clan can be awfully messy despite their good intentions — a broken jaw, a broken hand and a restraining order all figure into the plot — requires defending, with help from a lawyer played by Nicole Kidman. (In a fun change of pace from her sad white lady roles, her Linda is a well-adjusted, middle-class white lady.) Once Mark and his mother (Marcia Gay Harden, so icily patrician she could be a Ryan Murphy character), who’d previously tried to cover up Bodhi’s very existence with an NDA, reenter the picture, they try to cast Margo’s circle as unreliable, deviant, just plain strange.

On that last point, they may be right — it’s not every family that will bond over choreographing and constructing costumes for a serialized OnlyFans series. But, Margo’s Got Money Troubles counters with a defiant smile, so what? Maybe their corner of Fullerton is a little kooky, populated by people who make their very living by being larger than life. It still feels, at the end of it all, like a home.