OTT Review: Margo’s Got Money Troubles

Margo’s Got Money Troubles | Creator: David E Kelley | Cast: Elle Fanning, Nick Offerman, Michelle Pfeiffer | English | Apple TV

 When Margo’s professor in her small liberal arts college tells her she is a good enough writer for Harvard, you can almost see what’s going to happen. He turns out to be a heel, she turns out to be pregnant and in want of baby care. Her mother Shyanne (Michelle Pfeiffer) is only good at looking pretty and is the most unmaternal mother ever (this is expressed without judgement in this superbly non judgemental series). Turns out Margo has an itinerant dad (Nick Offerman), a former wrestling superstar named Jinx who wants to help. There is a slight hitch—he is a recovering addict. Just as Succession and The White Lotus examine the lives of America’s one percenters, this series tells us how hope floats in the face of the Great American Scam where it is as expensive to get an education as it is to have a baby.

Elle Fanning, whom we last saw in Joachim Trier’s Sentimental Value, is stunning as the young mother turning to OnlyFans for financial support (now this is poverty porn in action), and Pfeiffer tells us why women in their sixties and seventies are being chosen to lead entertainment products.