Margo has money problems: Elle Fanning gets rich from the chaos (review)

Huge casting for this new Apple mini-series which dissects a family not quite like the others, but truly wonderful.

He confirms that he is indeed one of the most relevant authors on American television. And in passing offers his wife, Michelle Pfeiffer, one of her best roles in a long time.

David E. Kelley adapts the novel by Rufi Thorpe. The creator of Ally McBeal, Big Little Lies, The Undoing (HBO) and more recently Presumed Innocent (Apple TV) has created a captivating new prestige mini-series, around a lost young heroine, funny despite herself, and constantly on the edge of the precipice. Margo, an apprentice writer, attends a small regional college and pursues her dream while paying her bills with a job as a waitress. But her life is derailed when she becomes pregnant by her literature teacher. Against all odds, Margo decides to keep this baby. Very quickly, the troubles caught up with her. And Margo has no safety net. She ends up opening an account on OnlyFans…

Freshly nominated for the Oscars for Sentimental Value (by Joachim Trier), Elle Fanning bursts onto the small screen as Margo has money problems. An edifying title to say the least, for this series which autopsies the complicated daily life of a certain America which continually struggles to make ends meet. She portrays a young mother brimming with sincerity, as messy as she is endearing, who accumulates bad decisions with disarming candor, broke, and surrounded by adults barely more stable than her. Fanning does not hesitate to fully abandon herself to the role, to expose her body and to embrace without restraint the carnal dimension of Margo, claiming omnipresent nudity and intimate frontal sequences, without ever falling into the vulgar.

In this intimate chaos, the series also finds a tasty counterpoint on the family side, thanks to its parents, played by Michelle Pfeiffer and Nick Offerman, deliciously excessive. Granny obsessed with her appearance and her lost youth and ex-wrestling star grandpa just out of rehab, they form a duo of picturesque but remarkably nuanced grandparents.

This XXL casting works wonders – with the added bonus of appearances from Nicole Kidman, a regular in the world of David E. Kelley – but Margo Has Money Problems never amounts to a simple parade of stars. It’s something else. A false “drama” which clearly leans towards emotional chaos: repeated arguments, moral fatigue, and this persistent idea that parenthood, behind its rare moments of grace, also opens up chasms of doubt and solitude.

Funny in bursts, then suddenly heartbreaking, the series is especially valuable for the richness of its characters and the way in which it dynamites traditional family patterns.

Margo Has Money Problems embraces its sense of amorality to the end, with characters deliciously established in a gray zone and confronted with a more binary world. A contrast which nourishes real tension and gives the series an unexpected density, without ever seeking to simplify its contradictions.

Margo has money problems, mini-series in 8 episodes, to watch on Apple TV from April 15, 2026