Margot is having financial problems: Elle Fanning and Michelle Pfeiffer star in this comedy banned from OnlyFans | television

I I promise, it’s the title that attracted me to it. Margo’s Got Money Troubles is a new show on Apple TV (out Wednesday), starring Elle Fanning as a single mother who becomes an OnlyFans model. It joins a niche list of similarly frank titles about public impediments. To wit: Fleishman is in trouble; Big problem in little China. But Margo’s Got Money Troubles is better. Check assonance and rhythm. It has a wonderful texture, to borrow a word from a food review, which I immediately regret.

Our heroine, Margo Millett, is a first-year college student who gets pregnant by her professor. The married academic asks her to have an abortion; Her friends agree with him. She has the baby. I dropped out of college and got into financial trouble. She is trying to get out of them by joining the notorious content creation platform. She films nude videos as a sexy alien. If none of this excites you, can I interest you in Nick Offerman as Margo’s pro wrestler and drug addict father? Or Michelle Pfeiffer as her former Hooters waitress mother? no? Are you dead?

OnlyFans represents the mainstreaming of sex work, placing us in a new (but also very old) moment of cultural reckoning. Is Margot a sex worker? Or invalid? Is she pathetic? OnlyFans creators may change hands or millions depending on how smart they are. (Did Lily Allen reveal her foot receipts?) Content creators face a choice: keep their jobs secret or face difficult conversations. The show is too smart to resort to cliched narratives, or assume that judgment can be easily mitigated. But she’s refreshingly pro-sex. “All sex work is art,” says one of the creators, played by rapper Rico Nasty.

If the online world is like the Wild West, Margo is a prospector. The mechanics of how she advances, and what she has to demonstrate, are clearly a draw. And it’s exciting. But ranch is just dressing. The show is at its best in her first trimester, where she struggles with the stigma of being a young single mother. The friends can’t hide their frustration with Margo’s choice. Job interviews are disrupted when you get into the stroller. Margot’s college classmates sympathized with a crying baby keeping them awake before exams. Especially since their lease doesn’t even allow them to have a dog.

When the show peels back the layers, it reveals an adult theme: respect. Margot’s new career reveals the Internet as a dangerous two-way portal, opening the door to money, fame and infamy. The professor’s family is wealthy but morally bankrupt. Offerman’s Jinx is a fragile addict who desperately needs the world to see him reformed. Meanwhile, Margo’s mother, Cheyenne, a former good girl, is engaged to a respectable and ridiculously boring churchman. She squirms with rage as he suggests the line “I want to get serious with your idiot.” They’re all wrestling with something.

Come for the aliens, stay for the craft. Elle Fanning is an emotionally transparent actress who was nominated for an Academy Award for Sentimental Value. (I enjoyed her more in Predator: Badlands. Underrated!) Offerman is heartbreaking here, acting bleak and against type. Greg Kinnear, as Sean Kenney’s fiancé, once again goes against his corn-fed, JFK handsomeness to play an ass with hidden depths. Is his career a private joke with himself? Then there’s Pfeiffer, who simply isn’t human. Who looks like that?

She’s hilarious as Cheyenne, the unwilling grandmother who spends $400 a month on face cream and won’t hide her disappointment in her daughter. She’s unable to hold a baby without it screaming, and maybe she should too. “He deliberately shuts up when I catch him, just to make me feel bad about myself,” she said. In fact, Shiyan wants her daughter to achieve things that she herself was not able to achieve. “I ruined your life,” Margo says tentatively, addressing her mother for the one-night stand that led to her birth. Her mother responds with a tender kiss: “You ruined my life, so beautiful.”

This is a tough frontier within feminism: accepting deep ambivalence about motherhood. The show is as bold about such taboos as it is about the nuances of women’s choices. And who doesn’t love that title – deliciously dry, when the presentation is not. I’m impressed. I won’t be the only one.