Margo’s Got Money Troubles is, by most measures, a genuinely good television show. It is warm, funny, sharply written and anchored by a cast that brings remarkable depth to material that could easily have tipped into either melodrama or cheap comedy. Elle Fanning is disarming in the lead role, and the ensemble around her, Michelle Pfeiffer, Nick Offerman, Nicole Kidman, Thaddea Graham, operates at a level that justifies every bit of the critical praise the show has received since its debut on Apple TV.
And I say all of that as a fan. A genuine one.
But being a fan does not mean watching without questions. And the question that Margo’s Got Money Troubles will not leave me alone about, the one that sits just underneath the warmth and the laughter, is a simple one, even if the answer is not: would this show exist in the same form if Margo were not white?
The premise is, on paper, genuinely provocative. Margo is a college dropout who becomes pregnant and turns to OnlyFans to support herself and her baby. Her father is a former professional wrestler with a drug addiction. Her mother has been lying to her new husband. There are custody battles, mounting debt and moral compromises at nearly every turn. These are not the circumstances of a character designed to be admired. They are the circumstances of a character designed to be understood.
And that is precisely what the show asks of us. It does not ask us to approve of Margo’s choices. It asks us to feel for her. It asks us to sit with her father’s relapse not as a referendum on his character but as a portrait of a man undone by something larger than himself. It frames her mother’s dishonesty not as villainy but as survival. It treats OnlyFans not as a punchline or a moral failing but as a complicated economic reality that a young woman is navigating with the tools available to her. That is a generous, humanizing gaze.
It is also, as a Black woman watching this show, a painful one. Because I know, not suspect, not wonder, but know, that gaze would not have landed the same way on someone who looked like me.
The Rotten Tomatoes score would not be where it is. The critics would not be using words like warm and sharp and human. The conversation would be different. And that difference is not hypothetical. It is the product of a long and well-documented history of how American media has chosen to see, or not see, certain lives.
OnlyFans, as a subject, carries enormous cultural stigma. Most people do not speak about it openly and many actively look down on those who use it. But when Margo turns to it, the show and the audience extend her something remarkable: the benefit of the doubt. We understand why she is doing it. We root for her anyway. We do not reduce her to the choice. That willingness to separate a person from their circumstances, to insist on their full humanity even when their circumstances are uncomfortable, is exactly the kind of grace that has historically been rationed on screen by race.
Had this been a Black woman’s story, or a Latina woman’s story, the cultural machinery would likely have processed it very differently. There is a particular kind of judgment that attaches itself to Black and brown women in difficult circumstances, a tendency to read their struggles not as the product of a specific situation but as evidence of something broader, something cultural, something they brought on themselves. The complexity collapses. The empathy narrows. What reads as relatable in one body reads as pathological in another.
The show is not entirely unaware of this. Margo’s immediate circle includes an Asian friend, and when she ventures further into the OnlyFans world in search of community and mentorship, she finds it in women who include KC (portrayed by Rico Nasty), a Black woman who brings an undeniable energy and presence to the role. And here is where the show put me in a genuine conundrum.
Because watching Rico Nasty’s character alongside her friend Rose (Lindsey Normington) , there is something that reads as freedom. As empowerment. As choice. And that distinction matters enormously. These women are not products of circumstance in the way Margo is. They are not doing this because they have run out of options. They are doing this because they want to, because it is an extension of who they are, because their sexuality and their creativity belong to them and they have decided to own that fully. There is a liberation in how they carry themselves that is genuinely compelling to watch, and I find myself championing them precisely because of it.
But that contrast also sharpens the central problem. Margo is sympathetic in large part because she is a victim of her circumstances. She signed a contract with her father’s family that derailed her education. She is a storyteller, a writer, a young woman trying to use her gifts even in the middle of chaos. Her foray into OnlyFans is framed as resourcefulness, even artistry, not exploitation. The child’s father is clearly positioned as the villain of her story. The audience is never asked to consider whether Margo shares responsibility for her situation, because the show has already decided she does not.
And I keep coming back to the same question. Would that same protective framing have been extended to a Black woman or a Latina woman in the same situation? Would the child’s father still be the unambiguous villain? Would her choices still read as survival and creativity rather than recklessness and irresponsibility? Would we be rooting for her, or would we be quietly holding her accountable in the way we so rarely hold Margo?
We have been conditioned, through decades of media, to extend complexity to certain lives and flatten others. To see one woman’s difficult circumstances as something that happened to her and another’s as something she caused. To champion one woman’s use of her sexuality as empowerment and read another’s through an entirely different moral lens. The women in this show who choose this life freely, who own it, who are not apologizing for it, they are compelling precisely because the choice is theirs. Margo is compelling because the choice feels like the only one she had. Both things can be true. Both can be worthy of our empathy.
But only one of them, it seems, is guaranteed it.
That is not Margo’s fault. It is not Elle Fanning’s fault. It is not even, entirely, the show’s fault. It is the water we have all been swimming in for a very long time. But the fact that I can sit with this show, laugh with it, feel genuinely moved by it, and still feel the sting of knowing it could not have been made the same way about a woman who looked like me, that is not a contradiction. That is just what it is to watch television as a Black woman in America.
You can love something and still see it clearly. In fact, sometimes loving it is exactly what makes you see it.