The star powerfully plays the mum to Elle Fanning’s cash-strapped single mother and OnlyFans creator in this charming schmaltzfest – which could have been so much more

Margo’s Got Money Troubles first gives us the why. Margo’s got money troubles because Margo got pregnant. Margo got pregnant because she is so young, and she thought her English professor writing her a poem was A Good Thing (poems written by English professors are never A Good Thing). She started having sex with her English professor and their combined brain power clearly didn’t extend to contraceptive deployment. Margo stayed pregnant because there’s no story in “young woman has termination, goes on with the rest of her life pretty untraumatised, actually”. Margo had the baby. And that is where the money troubles start.

David E Kelley’s new series is an eight-part comedy-drama, adapted from the pugnacious romp of a 2024 bestselling novel by Rufi Thorpe, and directed by Dearbhla Walsh. It stars Elle Fanning (as great as she is in The Great) as the eponymous heroine and Michelle Pfeiffer as her mother, Shyanne (which, along with her role in The Madison, might signal a proper career renaissance for the actor – Kidman-style, but less boring).

Fanning is a young single mother who makes adult content in this hilarious series. It is smart, sexy and bold – and Pfeiffer is unmissable as her ex-Hooters-waitress mother

I promise, it’s the title that drew me in. Margo’s Got Money Troubles is a new Apple TV show (out Wednesday), starring Elle Fanning as a single mum who becomes an OnlyFans model. It joins a niche canon of similarly blunt titles about generic obstacles. To wit: Fleishman Is in Trouble; Big Trouble in Little China. Margo’s Got Money Troubles is better, though. Check out the assonance, the rhythm. It has great mouthfeel, to borrow a word from food reviewing, one I instantly regret.

Our hero, Margo Millet, is a first-year college student who falls pregnant by her professor. The married academic tells her to get an abortion; her friends agree with him. She has the baby. She drops out of college, falls into money troubles. She attempts to fall out of them by joining the notorious content creation platform. She does nude video shoots, in the character of a sexy alien. If none of this inflames you, can I interest you in Nick Offerman as Margo’s pro-wrestler, drug-addicted father? Or Michelle Pfeiffer as her blue collar, ex-Hooters-waitress mother? No? Are you dead?

Jamie Bell and Elle Fanning lead a starry cast in this clumsy satire that provides little fascination in a wealthy family’s suffocating lives

Since Jesse Armstrong’s Succession and Emerald Fennell’s Saltburn, wealthy, spoilt, dysfunctional siblings are the new rock’n’roll, and now here is a film from Greek screenwriter Efthimis Filippou (co-author of Yorgos Lanthimos’s Alps and Dogtooth) and directed by Karim Aïnouz. It is a weird-wave contrivance concerning a messed-up US plutocrat clan living in Spain, freely remade from Marco Bellocchio’s 1965 film Fists in the Pocket. Their bizarre and cartoony secrets, involving sex abuse, manipulation and self-harm, are satirically symptomatic of capitalism and the patriarchy, and how the rich, however entrepreneurial and smart, create a next-gen class of useless drones, on whose behalf all this wealth has supposedly been accumulated. I have to admit to finding it heavy-handed and clumsy more often than not, although there are some good performances, notably from Jamie Bell and Elle Fanning.

A strange extended family lives in a luxurious modernist house; the father (Tracy Letts) is a blind widower haunted by the memories of his late wife (Pamela Anderson) who was savaged by wolves in a nearby forest. His grownup children, infantilised by wealth, all live there: highly strung Robert (Lukas Gage) has epilepsy, and is entrusted with supervising his father’s horse riding; Anna (Riley Keough) is a talentless singer-songwriter; and Ed (Callum Turner) is a would-be fashionista. First among equals is Jack (Jamie Bell), who has the intimate honour of helping his father with his nightly teeth-cleaning; their mother’s teeth were always dazzlingly white.