Margo's Got Money Troubles

go.

Also started watching Margot Has Money Problems, but I'm not really enjoying it.

I don't really think I like it as much as the internet's been telling me I should.

And I'm always watching Law & Order SVU.

So we've got a lot of time to think.

And so Dan watched Margot Got Money Troubles with his wife, binge watched it and loved it.

And after a day of field work, he pitched it to the students and said, hey, you know what? I think we should do an OnlyFans account.

Everybody saw that.

Both illustrate what is possible to say in a highly controlled medium, and in their limitations, what is no longer possible to say, or what is in the process on corporate media of being closed down at every moment.

Apple, by the way, the only major media company not to sink its profits into AI, got off to a slow start with its hits, Severance, The Morning Show, hardly being that, and with some contemporary clinkers like Margot Has Money Problems.

Severance, a favorite of bourgeois critics, posed as a workplace critique while actually apple-washing the company's practices such as exploitative outsourcing, while The Morning Show, though mildly excoriating, Daytime news shows for their blatant sexism ultimately found the good in their constant blathering and translating the news into flashy, unentertaining entertainment.

In these two recent outings, though, the company seems to have found a cagey way of lodging a critique.

The other prominent point of the series is that Paula expects the people she encounters to be decent, but instead what she meets everywhere are the ruthless but respectable denizens of a profit driven society these include the male cop who determines her guilt mainly by her acting outside the norm her ex's partner who fixes the judges for their custody battle her co-worker who seemingly helps her only to betray her by using her play to get ahead as a journalist complimented by her editor for being a Machiavellian backstabber and learning the lesson that a real journalist has no friends.

All this is initiated by the original transgression, the betrayal by the cam boy because later she is told he saw her love for her daughter as exploitable weakness.

This series is far more superior to Apple's other series on the subject of monetary sexual liaisons, Margot has money problems, where the usually reliable showrunner David E. Kelly succumbs to a cautious, pedantic examination of the subject.

Maximum Pleasure is also extraordinarily well written, with episode 6 paying off in a shocking and novel way Chekhov's dictum that a gun that appears in Act 1 must go off in Act 5.

Um, we also watched a couple weeks ago entertaining show, I think it's on Apple TV+.

Margot Has Money Problems.

What?

It's a funny show.

Take it over.

Never heard of it.

Wait, so Margot Has Money Problems is a girl funny or a boy funny?

Both.

It's compelling, it's uncomfortable, and it's exactly the kind of drama that makes you grateful your life is not this messy.

And then there's Margot's Got Money Troubles, which was a really unexpected favorite for me.

It's a messy life comedy, but it has so much heart and vulnerability.

It understands money stress.

But keeping a 64-year-old research project alive takes money, and since they lost federal funding, Dan and his grad student Emily Renke had to get creative.

As it turns out, Dan didn't have to look much further than a recent binge watch of Apple TV's Margot's Got Money Troubles with an interesting premise.

A single, young single woman who, with her father, creates an OnlyFans account to raise money to raise her child.

And I said, "Hmm, OnlyFans.

Yeah.

[laughs] Well, I'll just also note, in that early period just before and maybe going into just after, you know, you met Megan, and I think your first David E. Kelley show, decades before Margo's Got Money Troubles, was The Practice.

You did a, a-

That's right

Here you've got two in one year.

First for Death by Lightning, which as I alluded to earlier, Chester Arthur, just the most unlikely vice president, and then the most unlikely good president.

And then also, of course, Margo's Got Money Troubles back with David E. Kelley at a very different point in your career now.

I, I guess just with Death by Lightning first, adapted from a book that weirdly I'd actually [laughs] read in this case.