Margo’s Got Money Troubles: Season 1

10

I was lucky enough to be invited to a screening of this series by a buddy of mine. Apple showed us two episodes and then held a panel with David E. Kelly, Elle Fanning, Michelle Pfeiffer (who is, of course married to Kelly), Nick Offerman, Greg Kinnear and Thaddea Graham. Along with a producer and the director of the two episodes we watched. It had been a minute since I’d been to one of these types of screenings, but I was remarkably star-struck by Pfeiffer. Because, well, she’s Michelle Pfeiffer. I was also happy to see Kinnear who was, along with Paul Rudd, the only people I recall being kind to me — literally ask me how I was doing — when I was working for Scott Rudin and then called in to talk to him about Sabrina and Clueless respectively. Probably because they knew I was being tortured. Or maybe they’re just nice guys. That aside, I think the fact this was a special setup and the stars were there may have clouded my judgement about the series and made me actually excited to continue watching after taking in the first couple of episodes. Because, man, did this thing nosedive in the most what-is-this-show-even-about kind of way.

I was promised a comedy. Yet… nothing funny really happens after the episodes I first took in. Literally nothing. It’s not a funny show. Not because the jokes don’t hit. Nope, it turns out it’s a maudlin family drama about a young woman’s questionable life choices that we see mirrored in her parent’s questionable life choices. Here’s the plot — and I’m absolutely not spoiling anything here. Margo (Fanning) is a 20-year-old college student who is portrayed as a bit of a dreamer / outsider / aspiring sci-fi writer who has an affair with her older, married English professor (Michael Angarano). She ends up getting pregnant and decides (against her prof’s wishes) to keep the baby. She has the baby and realizes that having a baby and being a college student (albeit at a fourth-rate college) is not compatible. And that babies are expensive. Who knew? So, to supplement her non-income, she turns to OnlyFans with the help of her cosplaying roommate, Susie (Graham). The rest of the show is essentially her trying to figure out how to make more money on her channel, deal with her overbearing mother, Shyanne (Pfeiffer), and her ex-wrestler / addict father, Jinx (Offerman), who has just dropped back into her life. Side note: all three of their last names — Jinx, Shyanne and Margo — seems to be Millet, which is odd considering Jinx and Shyanne never got married and Margo was the product of a one night stand between Shyanne and Jinx, who I feel like only knew him by his single wrestling persona name. Also, Margo names her kid Bodhi. Bodhi.

But, yeah, that’s it. And, honestly, the show’s biggest sin is that it’s boring. Unless, of course, you want to start doing some age math. Because, you know I can’t help myself. Michelle Pfeiffer is 68 years old. Using her real age, she would have had Margo at the unlikely age of 48. But I think we’re supposed to believe she’s around 15-ish years younger than she actually is. Let’s call her 53. Sure. Offerman is 56 in real life, but let’s also call him 53 for argument’s sake. Meaning that they had Margo when both were 33. While Jinx ends up not being in Margo’s early life — she was the product of a one-night-stand, remember — all we hear about from Shyanne — who was supposedly a Hooter’s waitress when she and Jinx met — is how she had Margo so young and how Margo kind of hosed her life… Ma’am, you were a 33-year-old Hooter’s waitress. If you hadn’t figured your shit out by 33, I don’t think it’s the baby that fucked things up. She talks like she was also a very young adult like Margo when she got pregnant, but that just wasn’t the case. She was a full-ass adult. Math don’t lie. If you wanted this untruth to be true (and from my understanding align with the characters’ ages in the novel), hire a younger not-your-wife actress to be Shyanne and shift the whole timeline and cast different people. The issue here is that this like-mother-like-daughter generational premise is what guides the entire relationship between Shyanne and Margo. This guilt and whatever that Margo screwed up Shyanne’s life before it could even get started, the same way Bodhi is going to hose Margo’s life. Circle of life and all that garbage. But it just doesn’t add up. And is kind of a deal killer for me.

But back to the boring. Scenes go on way too long. Margo and Shyanne yell at each other and seem on the brink of something radical, but then one scene later everything is fine. It’s like Marvel superhero fights. You watch them punch each other and throw each other through walls and you’re like, what’s the point, neither of them can die and in the next scene their uniforms will be good as new and they’ll have suffered not at all. Stakes, man. I also don’t give a crap about OnlyFans. It holds absolutely no meaning or space in my head. I just can’t care. Also, are all OnlyFans as weird and wacky as Margo’s? Where she teams up with a couple other OnlyFansers to create these elaborate stories about aliens and shit? I thought dudes tune in (or whatever you call it) to look at boobs and have women pretend to like them sexually while bleeding their bank accounts dry? Who is paying for her oddball green body paint and bleep bloop stuff? Weirdos. Anyhow, the big tension in the series — aside from Margo’s money troubles — is the fact that she has a baby and is making money doing alien stuff with occasional boob stuff. Yes, this becomes a “nobody can take my baby away from me” show. The baby daddy. The baby daddy’s Cruella de Vil mother (Marcia Gay Harden). The state. Public opinion. All of them are against her because she can’t go get a job at Starbucks or The Gap and needs instead to do sex work. The definition of which still escapes me. Which leads to one of the stressors here. And, mind you, Margo is not Spider-Man. She uses an alias, Hungry Ghost, for her work, but ends up getting outed as Margo at one point after being spotted at a party by a couple horny teens. Thing is, she shows her face on screen. Anyone who knew or knows her could out her at any second. And it was never expressed as a worry at any point in the narrative. But, all of a sudden, she’s like fucking Peter Parker at the end of Spider-Man: Far From Home when his secret identity is exposed and splashed all over the news. Except that exposure could actually be dangerous for this world-famous superhero, whereas nobody cares about a rando OnlyFans streamer. Honestly, the show treats it like it’s going to lead the six o’clock news. Breaking: college dropout and new mom turns to OnlyFans to make some extra scratch to pay the bills! Seriously, how is that not the story of like half the women on the that platform? And Margo acts like this is going to be some huge to-do. Even though she seems to know like three people in the world and has no other jobs to lose because she’s an OF person. Yes, it’s not great when you’re trying to retain custody of your baby, but it’s something that was going to come up anyway when she’s asked how she’s supporting herself and Bodhi. It’s really stupid.

Anyhow, the season past those initial episodes — post-baby, basically — is quite a slog. The show locks in that the only revenue stream that Margo has access to is OnlyFans. And that the very thing that she needs to survive with her child is the thing that’s threatening to take him away. So… I don’t know how many people who work for a living make that living from OnlyFans, but let’s look at the number of people who make a living not from OnlyFans. I’d imagine, if we calculated the percentage difference, that it would be pretty significant. And not all those people need to not show their boobs on camera to keep ahold of their kid. So, bit of advice: just go do something / anything that isn’t public sex work. If your child is so important to you to the level you claim. Your alien shit is silly anyway. My point is, don’t let the light, wacky vibes of the trailer fool you. This is more melodrama that keeps going back to the “but-my-baby!” well than it is comedy and becomes tiresome over the span of the eight 40-minute-ish episodes. Despite a cast that you’d hope could yuck it up. Also — and this is a me problem — I can’t ever get the name of this series right. Mostly calling it Margo Has Money Problems or Margo’s Got Money Issues. The title sounds weirdly British to me — “troubles” isn’t a word Americans use. Anyway, the show has been renewed for a second season. The crux of which seems to be: what happens after Margo finally shows her vajayjay on camera? No, seriously, that’s the big dramatic note for the second season. This can’t go well unless there’s a hard pivot of some sort. Maybe it’ll be a prequel about that time when Shyanne was debating signing up for AARP when she accidentally got pregnant by an aging-out WWE star.