‘Margo’s Got Money Troubles’ Won TV’s OnlyFans Wars

Margo Millet specializes in “constructive, recreational appendage analysis,” and for $20 on OnlyFans, she will tell you what Pokémon your penis most resembles and what attacks it might have.

Artfully detailing strangers’ private parts on the internet is not exactly the kind of work the protagonist of Margo’s Got Money Troubles dreamed of doing when she was little, but she’s strapped for cash, parenting solo, and has an uncanny gift for it (such as: “Your Bulbasaur’s special move is Ooze Attack, extremely potent pre-cum”). Before long, and with 200 new followers, Margo has learned her first lesson: “The ones that hate their dicks, they tip the most.”

TV has never shied away from portrayals of sex workers and the business of porn, but Apple TV’s adaptation of Rufi Thorpe’s 2024 novel of the same name, provides one of its most complex. The show’s season finale aired May 20.

OnlyFans is now its own subgenre in pop culture. A decade since it launched, and with more than 4 million creators on the platform, the adult content site, and everything it represents about the future of work for Gen Z, has emerged as one of Hollywood’s most human narratives. As Margo makes clear, “I can’t just go and get another job.” The creator class, also a pain point in the current season of HBO’s Euphoria, has become the ultimate allegory for society: online, we are all just entertainment for one another.

The very niche genre of erotic humiliation is just the tip of the iceberg for Margo (Elle Fanning), a book-smart 20-year-old college dropout who, after a brief affair with her literature professor, finds out she is pregnant, loses her job, and suddenly has to pay double in rent after two roommates move out because they can’t handle the baby’s relentless crying. Turning to OnlyFans, though, ends up being a blessing in disguise; it provides Margo with a stable income while also acting as a creative outlet for her.

Margo quickly runs into a common problem for creators on the platform who don’t have large social media followings: No one can find her. (According to OnlyFans, the platform intentionally limits its search feature as a safety precaution so users don’t accidentally encounter NSFW content they didn’t intend to see.) Online, she learns that posting multiple times a week and collaborating with like-minded creators is the best way to grow her following—and, with the help of her cosplay-obsessed bestie, she creates a persona called Hungry Ghost, an alien with an insatiable sexual appetite. “Give me your boredom, your sadness, your anxieties. I will eat it all,” she writes in her bio, realizing she will have to expand her social media presence beyond OnlyFans to gain more followers. “Find me on TikTok and Instagram to see how my story began.”

It’s the kind of sex work story, unsexy and mundane, rarely entrusted to an audience, and not because those stories don’t exist, but because they have never fit into the tidy—or sensationalized—narratives of how the business actually works. There isn’t anything particularly titillating about the granular details of how to grow your following—in Margo’s case, it’s more funny than anything else.

Thorpe created an OnlyFans account to do research for the book because she didn’t want Margo to be just another content creator who sells the same boring nudes and custom videos. “Part of what makes OnlyFans sexy is when it feels authentic and real, as opposed to hyperproduced pornography that makes it feel less intimate,” Thorpe said in an interview with Variety. Drawn to their ability to combine actual human elements into the profession, she pulled inspiration from unorthodox creators like BigHonkinCaboose, a comedian who incorporates a lot of humor into her OnlyFans, and HarperTheFox, a musician with a gift for creating parody songs about giving head and consensual anal sex.

“The work inherently has funny aspects to it. Sexual things in general can have an air of silliness and absurdity, and I’ve never shied away from making jokes within my sex life or my content. I find it puts people at ease,” Megan Graves, who performs as BigHonkinCaboose, tells WIRED. “I’ve also dressed up as Handsome Squidward and Meg Griffin for content simply because I thought it would be funny, and I stand by those choices.”

Graves, 30, joined OnlyFans in 2020 and says that being herself has always been the most satisfying and natural way to create something and to find people who genuinely connect with it. It’s the same approach Margo takes: building sets and crafting elaborate storylines about Hungry Ghost into viral TikTok microdramas with the help of two local creators (always, of course, with a reminder to check out her spicy content on her OF page.)

While Graves says there’s no universal way to tell a story about sex work, “the more it’s coming from a place of being genuine and not trying to be the butt of a joke or used for shock value, the better.”

Where Margo’s Got Money Problems wants to humanize the experience of sex workers rather than catastrophize the extremes of the profession, Euphoria—which has always had an uneasy relationship to sex and online sex work—revels in shock value.

Currently in its third season, creator-director Sam Levinson frames the profession through a series of escalating humiliation rituals by depicting sex workers as willing to do anything for money. Initially, Cassie (Sydney Sweeney) starts on OnlyFans to foot the bill for the $50,000 in wedding flowers she’s determined to have, but with Maddie (Alexa Demie) as her manager, it quickly descends into something much darker.

For Cassie, being an influencer, we’re told, is her destiny. “For my fans, I’ll do anything,” she says, and means it. But the glamour and fame of the job is undercut by the constant churn of new content: she records foot videos, ASMR, humiliation kinks, age play, and gets requests to fart in jars for $700. In one scene, she pretends to be a baby while wearing a diaper, legs spread in the eagle position (OnlyFans prohibits age-play content that includes real or simulated minors under 18, and the video likely would’ve been removed from her page in real life). In another, she acts as a giantess, squeezing a doll between her breasts, pretending to make her subscribers feel tiny (this, however, is a frequent practice among straight and gay creators).

Levinson, who apparently drew inspiration from the 1958 sci-fi horror film Attack of the 50 Foot Woman, has said that he wanted to frame Cassie’s foray into sex work to read as a series of hijinks. “What we wanted to always find is the other layer of absurdity that we’re able to tie into it so that we’re not too inside of her fantasy or illusion,” he said in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter.

According to Annie Knight, Maddy was right about one thing when she told Cassie, “You got their attention, now you gotta keep it.”

While sex workers have called Cassie’s storyline “bleak and gross,” Knight tells WIRED her arc actually mirrors how internet fame works for some creators and says she deliberately leaned into controversy to build her own brand. “The more eyes on you, whether the feedback is negative or positive, means you’re reaching more people, and a lot of those people are willing to subscribe,” she says. “I started thinking, what can I do that’s going to grab people’s attention?” Knight, who is 29 and has over 500,000 followers across Instagram, TikTok and X, built her persona around challenges, first by sleeping with a different guy every day for a year, then, in 2025, having sex with 583 men in a single day.

“People went crazy. They were saying horrible things, but the more people commented, the more viral my videos went, the more subscribers I earned. I definitely realized very quickly that controversy was profitable,” she says.

As the cultural footprint of OnlyFans has expanded, so too have the representations of sex work in the larger culture. Margo’s Got Money Troubles is about the art of the profession, and the community of people around it. Euphoria underscores the most extreme realities of the business. Both, in their own way, pull from the fabric of our vast and ever-growing online sexual economy—one that is being recorded in real time.