Custody Battle, OnlyFans, Season 2

SPOILER ALERT: This article contains spoilers for “Lock and Load,” the Season 1 finale of “Margo’s Got Money Troubles,” now streaming on Apple TV.

In the first episode of “Margo’s Got Money Troubles,” college student Margo (Elle Fanning) is led to believe she’s throwing her life and creative pursuits away for good after she decides to go through with an unplanned pregnancy. By the end of the season finale, though, she has not only won the tireless custody battle for Bodhi against his absent father, Mark (Michael Angarano), but is creatively rejuvenated through her work on OnlyFans.

“What actually happens over the course of the season [is] that the presence of Bodhi in her life kind of supercharges her creativity,” executive producer Eva Anderson, who has been upped to co-showrunner for the recently announced Season 2, tells Variety. “It gives her all this drive to make the best of her life, to be someone that her son will look up to, be proud of and take good care of him. So all the amazing work that she does, ultimately, is for her kid and for herself. It’s counter to all of those messages she’s been given.”

Adapted from Rufi Thorpe’s bestselling 2024 novel of the same name and created for television by David E. Kelley — the renowned showrunner known for creating “Ally McBeal” and “The Practice,” and successfully bringing “Big Little Lies” and “Presumed Innocent” to the small screen — the eight-episode Apple TV series follows Margo on her chaotic, turbulent and artistic journey navigating motherhood.

As a single mother desperate for money to support Bodhi and keep a roof over her head, Margo turns to OnlyFans, a popular subscription-based platform where creators make money from posting explicit videos. Her dysfunctional family, which includes her judgmental mother, Shyanne (Michelle Pfeiffer), and ex-pro wrestler father, Jinx (Nick Offerman), who abandoned Margo when she was a child, ultimately come together to help Margo raise Bodhi. Jinx even moves in with Margo and her last remaining college roommate, Susie (Thaddea Graham), against Shyanne’s wishes.

Margo starts off her journey as a young mother feeling isolated, but soon realizes the power in the village around her after Shyanne and Jinx show up for her in the courtroom. Kelley says the big discovery in the writing process was realizing how essential the family element of the show is — even characters like Susie and Kenny (Greg Kinnear), Shyanne’s husband, become “de facto family members.”

“By the time we have that custody battle in the courtroom, we really wanted to feel them individually and feel the unit. I’m not sure we really anticipated the depth of that unit at the beginning of the journey, but by the Vegas episode, we knew we had that,” Kelley says. “The magic in our bottle, at least for me, was Margo’s ferocity, and the ferocity of love that all these characters had for each other. The way they would go about executing or manifesting their devotion sometimes was suspect, but there’s no question that the love and devotion was there.”

The stakes are high for the custody battle after child protective services (CPS) gets called on Margo following Jinx’s drug relapse in Episode 7. Once the judge asks everyone in Margo’s family to hold Bodhi, the bond everyone has formed with him — yes, even Shyanne! — makes his true home clear. The judge grants Margo full custody, while Mark gets to see Bodhi two weekends a month.

“It’s like when Mark says in the mediation that he doesn’t trust the tribe that’s raising the baby. The way things play out in court is Margo challenging that herself, showing that even though this is a messy tribe of weirdos, they can take care of this baby, that they love the baby, and the baby trusts and loves them,” Anderson says. “Mark doesn’t have that community around him.”

KC (Rico Nasty) and Rose (Lindsey Normington), the two OnlyFans creators that show Margo the ropes, help her realize the value of sex work as art. Tracking Margo’s development as an artist from the first episode, Kelley says “the pilot puts her up against a multitude of obstacles, any one of which could knock her down or defeat her. It’s not necessarily that she has a plan to slay her monsters, but she certainly has a will. Through eight episodes, we see a melding of that will with an actual plan and a creative throughline.”

The initial message that Margo is throwing away all her potential is punctuated by Shyanne, who herself became a mother at a young age, and worked as a Hooters waitress to get by. The parallels between mother and daughter enable the show to explore multi-generational cycles. “Shyanne was desperately afraid that Margo was going to be guilty of the same missteps that she made, but part of Shyanne’s discovery over the eight hours is that some of her missteps may have turned out to be her best work,” Kelley says.

He continues, “Part of the fun of the show was the role reversal — who was parenting who from episode to episode. One commonality they shared is that they both had a need, if not desperation, for the other’s approval, and never were quite secure in that they had it. [Through their] respective journeys, they came to that realization and recognition that they really were in each other’s corner and did have each other’s backs and approval. They were mother and daughter in one moment, combatants the next moment, and siblings or peers in the third moment.”

Anderson says that Margo’s best qualities as a new mother come from both Jinx and Shyanne’s differing personalities: “Margo gets her superpowers from her dad’s creativity — and her mom’s willingness to fight and her scrappiness, never backing down. Because they both love Margo so deeply, she’s able to synthesize those into something really special.”

The show’s exploration of sex work isn’t just in how the outside world judges Margo, but her family’s own response to Margo making money from OnlyFans. Shyanne has the far more outsized reaction when she finds out the night before getting married in Episode 5, leading to a stifled wedding day; Jinx comes to understand Margo’s decision earlier on, but also has reservations.

Other popular shows, such as “Euphoria” Season 3, which features Sydney Sweeney’s character using OnlyFans, and Sean Baker’s Oscar-winning film “Anora,” which starred Mikey Madison as a sex worker, have stirred complex conversations about how the profession is depicted in media. Anderson says the goal with exploring Margo’s decision to use OnlyFans, which gets weaponized against her in the finale after Mark calls her a “pervert,” was to approach it in a “non-judgmental way” because Margo approaches everything in her life through that lens.

“If you were someone in Margo’s position, and you stepped into OnlyFans, this is an experience you might have,” Anderson says. “It’s not the story of somebody who’s in the Top 10 OnlyFans models in the country or the world, it’s just about somebody trying to make it work.” (The producers even made a real OnlyFans account for research purposes.)

Kelley and Anderson, who wrote the finale together, say they remained quite faithful to the source material, but made a few notable changes that build out how the family comes together in the end. Shyanne, for example, is not as present in the novel.

“She goes away fairly soon in the book, but the character felt so rich to all of us, and the relationship between Margo and Shyanne felt so instrumental to the book and to who Margo was, that we felt compelled to keep Shyanne,” Kelley says. “It felt very organic.” 

though Kelley and Anderson remain tight-lipped on Season 2 details — Anderson quips “we’re moving the whole gang to Mexico” with new identities! — the Season 1 finale leaves much to be explored after Margo begins the next step in her OnlyFans endeavours, and Kenny is revealed to have called CPS on Margo as a protective measure.

“One thing that is really great about the book is that Rufi Thorpe originally envisioned it as a series of books. So she has, in her own head, [ideas] for these stories to continue, which is why when you read Margo on the page, you can imagine these characters going on for years and lifetimes,” Anderson says. “We’re grabbing a couple of Rufi’s ideas for the second season. I’m very excited for where we might go with it.”