Margo's Got Money Troubles Is the Must-See Show of the Spring

The rights to adapt Rufi Thorpe’s novel Margo’s Got Money Troubles for TV were snapped up nearly a year before its publication, with Nicole Kidman, David E. Kelley, Elle and Dakota Fanning, and the swaggering indie studio A24 all attached to the project. Read the book, and you’ll see why. It tells the story of a college freshman and aspiring writer who gets pregnant by her married professor, decides to have the baby—financial precarity be damned—and turns to OnlyFans to support the child. Maybe this sounds like an X-rated Juno ripoff. But Thorpe’s prose ushers us through the eponymous hero’s crises with humor and panache, filtering the bright but naive protagonist-Margo’s evolution through the voice of a narrator-Margo who has developed some perspective. She’s surrounded by distinctive, lovable yet deeply flawed characters. The dialogue is as realistic as it is punchy. It all adds up to an unconventional sort of Künstlerroman that demands to be devoured in a weekend and revisited whenever you need a pick-me-up.

But just because a book is an obvious choice for adaptation, doesn’t mean that the show will live up to its source material. Margo’s layered voice presents a challenge; the novel-to-series pipeline often relies too heavily on clunky, uncinematic narration. Thorpe’s characters are so specific, their balance of prickliness and kindness and quirk so delicate, that one wrong casting choice could ruin the whole viewing experience. And it takes a certain offbeat finesse to integrate Margo’s far-out OnlyFans productions—which become a more satisfying creative outlet than any freshman comp seminar—into what is otherwise a grounded family dramedy. I’ve been extremely critical of Kelley’s prolific post-Big Little Lies output. So let me be very clear that with Margo, whose first three episodes hit Apple TV on Wednesday, he has succeeded where many other…