She paints herself metallic green, transforms into an alien persona named The Hungry Ghost, and charges subscribers to watch her offer blunt, merciless critiques of their genitalia. It sounds like something dreamed up in a writers' room after several sleepless nights — but for Elle Fanning's Margo, the character at the center of Apple TV+'s buzzy new drama Margo's Got Money Troubles, it's just Tuesday.
And increasingly, it's just television.
OnlyFans is now all over mainstream TV — playing a central role in Apple TV+'s Margo's Got Money Troubles, driving a key subplot in the latest season of HBO's Euphoria where Sydney Sweeney's Cassie ascends to stardom on the platform, featuring in a storyline on HBO's Industry, and even being parodied on ABC's Abbott Elementary, the most wholesome show on television. Add to that the murder thriller Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed, which kicks off with a shirtless Brandon Flynn sweet-talking Tatiana Maslany via webcam, and the picture becomes undeniable: the subscriber-based adult content platform has officially gone primetime.
The Character Who Started the Conversation
At the center of the cultural moment is Margo Millet — a 20-year-old single mother navigating financial hardship, motherhood, and the complexities of internet fame. After a brief affair with her English professor leaves her pregnant and unemployed, Margo turns to OnlyFans to make ends meet. With guidance from her estranged father Jinx — a former professional wrestler — she applies his performance strategies to build a successful online persona.
The series, which premiered on April 15, also stars Michelle Pfeiffer as Margo's ex-Hooters waitress mom and Nick Offerman as her ex-pro wrestler dad, with Nicole Kidman and Marcia Gay Harden rounding out a stacked ensemble. The show is created by David E. Kelley — Pfeiffer's husband — based on Rufi Thorpe's bestselling 2024 novel.
Fanning, for her part, committed fully to the role. She revealed that she actually created her own OnlyFans account to research the part, an act of preparation that underlines just how seriously prestige television is now treating a platform that, not long ago, would have been entirely off-limits for mainstream discourse.
A Platform That Has More Than Doubled
The numbers behind OnlyFans help explain why Hollywood has taken notice. The pay-per-view platform has more than doubled in size since 2021, growing from 187.9 million registered users to 377.5 million by 2025. Today, more than 4.6 million people worldwide have become creators on the platform, known for featuring everything from foot fetish photos to explicit adult content.
That explosive growth didn't happen in a vacuum. The platform took off during the pandemic, when financial uncertainty pushed many people to find income wherever they could, and it has only continued to expand as economic pressures persist.
It's the Economy, Stupid
The more revealing question isn't why OnlyFans keeps showing up on television — it's why the characters who use it all share the same fundamental problem. The characters' motivations for joining — or thinking about joining — OnlyFans may vary, but the reason is inherently the same: the traditional job market isn't working for them.
Rufi Thorpe, the novelist behind Margo's Got Money Troubles, has been direct about this connection. She believes the "increasing financial hardship in this country" has something to do with the rising cultural relevance of a platform like OnlyFans — and she wrote her protagonist as an OnlyFans model specifically because, it was "easier to imagine yourself doing" than other forms of sex work.
Both Margo's Got Money Troubles and Euphoria cast debt as a bogeyman turning capitalism into an extraction device that, left unchecked, can take everything from any of us. These are not stories about women who chose OnlyFans as their dream career. They are stories about women who ran out of other options.
How Hollywood Is Handling the Material
Television's treatment of sex work and OnlyFans in particular has ranged from nuanced to reductive — and real-life sex workers have been quick to point out where the screen gets it wrong.
Though real-life sex workers certainly relate to the way characters in Margo's Got Money Troubles, Euphoria, and Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed begin camming for money, it's much harder to get rich than TV often makes it seem.
There are also content accuracy issues. In Euphoria, Cassie dresses up as a baby and a dog as she poses for provocative pictures — but pedophilia and bestiality, even in the context of roleplay, are banned on OnlyFans. Sex worker activist AM Davies, a former sex worker herself, expressed concern: "The problem is that people watch movies and TV and forget that it's not real. They think something similar could happen in real life."
Still, many critics and scholars see something meaningful in television's shift toward depicting OnlyFans not with shame but with a kind of matter-of-fact empathy. Some analysts argue stories that feature webcam work are almost a "feminist media. There's something empowering that people associate with OnlyFans, much more than they do pornography. It's not as objectifying because the content provider has some power in the process."
That idea is central to how Margo's Got Money Troubles frames its premise. Margo doesn't stumble into The Hungry Ghost by accident — she constructs her, deliberately and creatively, with the strategic eye of someone who has learned that in a broken economy, the only reliable asset you might have left is yourself.