Elle Fanning's Apple TV Series Gets Sydney Sweeney's Euphoria Season 3 Storyline Right

If you, like me, are watching both "Euphoria" Season 3 and the debut season of "Margo's Got Money Troubles," you may have noticed something: the former show fails at the very thing that the latter does perfectly. What I mean by that is "Margot's Got Money Troubles" depicts a character engaging in sex work in a thoughtful, empathetic, and empowering way, and the third season of "Euphoria" appears to be a humiliation ritual for Sydney Sweeney.

Admittedly, "Margo" has an unfair advantage in its story. While "Euphoria" comes exclusively from the twisted mind of Sam Levinson, "Margo" is based on the best-selling novel of the same name by Rufi Thorpe (a novel I happen to love and wholeheartedly recommend). In both versions of "Margo," our titular Margo Millet, played by recently minted Oscar nominee Elle Fanning, has an affair with her college professor and gets pregnant. Deciding to keep the baby, Margo gives birth to a son named Bodhi ... but after her roommates move out over the crying newborn, and she gets fired from her job, Margo finds herself in a massive financial bind. When she starts rating men's bathing suit areas on an anonymous OnlyFans account under the name HungryGhost — and comparing those areas to Pokémon with increasingly clever analyses — she starts finding success, and ends up linking up with other creators to make a living.

Then there's "Euphoria" Season 3, where Sweeney's Cassie Howard, ostensibly all "grown up" after a five-year time jump, dabbles in adult content on her own before linking up with her high school bestie Maddy Perez (Alexa Demie) for help with her new line of work. Ultimately, though, it's about the way these shows treat Margo and Cassie ... with kindness in one case and derision in the other.

Cassie Howard has never exactly been an aspirational figure on "Euphoria," whether we're learning that she gave up her dreams of becoming a figure skater after her father left the Howard family or watching her obsess over Maddy's on-again, off-again boyfriend Nate Jacobs (Jacob Elordi) during the HBO show's second season. In Season 3, it seems, at first, like Cassie has everything she's ever wanted. She and Nate live in an enormous and gaudy house and are getting married (though Cassie does throw sort of a fit over the wedding flowers, insisting she needs the arrangements that cost $50,000), but she's still, as Rue tells us in a voiceover, lost. 

"It was a shame she was with Nate. Cassie was the kind of girl Maddy dreamed of signing," Rue says of Maddy's attempt to become a manager of OnlyFans models and leave her assistant job behind. "Beautiful, but directionless. So desperate for attention, she's willing to humiliate herself. Those are the kind of girls you can really mine." Later in that second episode, "America My Dream" — in which Cassie is in a baby costume complete with a diaper and pacifier, her legs spread wide — Maddy tells Cassie that her "sexy dog" video won't get her very far. "Yeah, the doggie video? It's fun, and it's campy, but it's not sexy, and it's not timeless. It just feels desperate. It feels like you're trying way too hard."

We don't need to try too hard to unpack what "Euphoria" is saying about Cassie writ large here. The show thinks she's desperate, stupid, and sad. That's why having her become an OnlyFans model is demeaning. Margo, on the other hand? She's an entrepreneur.

Okay, so part of this does come down to one factor: Elle Fanning is, by every imaginable metric, a better actress than Sydney Sweeney. Argue with me all you want. That's just a fact. Still, I can't imagine a world where even someone as talented as Fanning could successfully sell the storyline given to Sweeney in Season 3 of "Euphoria," because it's vapid, empty, and even cruel. At the end of the day, it's disrespectful — not just to real adult content creators out there in the world, but to Sweeney and Cassie.

That's where "Margo's Got Money Troubles" does something very right: it offers genuine empathy and respect to Margo, a young woman who finds herself in an impossible situation and finds a productive and, frankly, financially lucrative way to handle it. (Also, the montage in the fourth episode, titled "Buddies," where Margo types out a series of Pokémon descriptors to describe various pictures of guys' junk, is really funny.) Margo doesn't do all of this totally on her own. 

Her one remaining roommate, Susie (Thaddea Graham), plants the idea in her head, and even though her former wrestler dad, Jinx (a perfectly cast Nick Offerman), is horrified at first, he ultimately apologizes to Margo for judging her so harshly ... and he's always game to babysit for Bodhi. In "Buddies," Margo also links up with those aforementioned creators, whose usernames we cannot print here but who, in the novel, become her found family.

"Margo's Got Money Troubles" tells a familiar and heartwarming story with a modern and raunchy spin, while "Euphoria" aims for shock and awe. That's why "Margo," which is streaming on Apple TV, succeeds where "Euphoria," on HBO Max, flounders.