One of the first reviews of Margo's
Got Money Trouble, the hysterical new comedy on Apple TV said it was the
first David E. Kelley project since Big Little Lies that wasn't an
adaptation of a mystery novel. Having got around to see the first two episodes
this weekend, I'll go further: this is the most David E. Kelley like project
he's done since he left network TV to start adapting best-sellers.
This isn't to throw shade on the
work he's done for HBO and streaming over the last decade; my readers know how
much I've worshipped his work in that form since Big Little Lies debuted.
I mean that Margo is the first project Kelley has done in a long time
that has the closest parallels to his incredible work in the 1990s and 2000s.
We've long since forgotten in the
era of Peak TV just how much Kelley was willing to push the boundaries of
network television from the moment he started Picket Fences with Tom
Skerritt catching his teenage daughter having sex in her bedroom as he's about
to call her down for breakfast. Lost
under his topicality that drove so much of his legal dramas was just how much
Kelley pushed the envelope when it came to sex on network television for the
1990s and well into the 2000s, particularly from the female gaze. Ally
McBeal was as much about women being dominant in how they flaunted their
sexuality even as some of them resisted the act itself; Lara Flynn Boyle's
Helen Gamble was an openly sexual woman (the scenes between her and Dylan
McDermott pushed the limit on Standards and Practices in 1998) and Kelley spent
much of Boston Public dealing with the sexuality of teenagers and their
ignorance of it ("Who thinks STD is a motor oil?" a teacher asked in
the pilot) and as we saw in Boston Legal, both men and women were sexually
active well into their sixties and seventies.
So while I'm aware that Margo's
Has Money Troubles is an adaptation of a bestselling novel, just watching
the first two episodes it has proven to be so much in the model of Kelley's
kind of TV during that period that it almost seems like a series he could have
had lying around in the 2000s for ABC that the bosses wouldn't touch and he
finally sold it to Apple last year after they bought his adaptation of Presumed
Innocent.
Margo is the title character, a
prospective writer the child of a single mother and a father she hasn't seen
for years. When she writes one of her stories for Fullerton College, her
professor asks why she's here rather than Harvard. Margo assumes she's going to
mentor him. Her best friend is weary and says he's want to sleep with you.
"He does not want to sleep with me." Cut to the two of them having
the kind of sex I'm very familiar with from Kelley's 90s but with the kind of
nudity you get from streaming and cable.
It's clear from the start that
this won't end well, even before we learn that the professor is married with
kids of his own. Margo, perhaps because she has been raised practically by her
mother alone and the two have a strange relationship ("I wanted to grow up
to be my mother's leg" she tells her professor after coitus) she really
thinks that this is going to work out somehow despite all advice to the
contrary. Needless to say this lasts until she vomits at her job and goes to
the professor who immediately tries to pressure her into having an abortion.
Margo then goes to see her mother
Sheyanne who is understandably appalled. She tells Margo in no uncertain terms
that she has thrown her life away, something Margo doesn't want to hear because
this is how she was conceived in the first place. Sheyanne makes it very clear
Margo has to do this on her own. We see
the next several weeks as Margo continues to get more pregnant and somehow more
sexual, all while her college roommates continue to judge her. Finally she goes
to Bloomingdales with her mother to buy a baby carriage and runs into her
professor who commits the sin of first denying paternity and then checking out
Sheyanne as she walks by. Sheyanne is
infuriated and tells Margo to get out of the car so that she can give a primal
scream. "It's going to be bad for the baby."
At the end of the Pilot Margo
gives birth. Eventually she asks when the stitches will come out. "Will it
get back to normal?" "No," Sheyanne immediately says. "No
matter how many Kegels you do." This is exactly the kind of line Kelley
would've had one of his characters say in 1997 if he could have gotten away
with it.
I got that feeling all the way
through Margo's getting home and her initial taking care of the baby. I know I
may be being sexist to say this but I laughed hysterically during Margo's
tearful monologue in which she describes just how much her breasts have
becoming misshapen and deform because of how horrible her son Bodhi is at
breastfeeding. She gives a realistic, tearful and wondrous rant using all the
terms that I associate with the scribe of Ally McBeal. That is just as
realistic as her roommates increasing contempt for the baby's non-stop crying.
"They wouldn't let us keep a dog, but they let her keep a screaming
baby," one says. And of course one of them tells her that the baby is her
responsibility and that she has to pass her biochem exam the next day.
All of this is Kelley-Esque as is
the fact of her father being a professional wrestler named Jinx who's been out
of touch for years, is still wrestling even though he's being told its time to
retire and is willing to trade his championship belt for a motorcycle so he can
see his daughter.
In quick succession Margo loses
her job, can't afford a babysitter, her roommates move out to stick her with
more rent and she decides to extort her professor. The second episode ends with
his mother demanding to negotiate and I know it won't end well.
I have described how wonderful
this is without getting to the cast. Elle Fanning in the title role is no
stranger to comedy and nudity as she did both in playing Young Catherine in
Hulu's The Great, loved by many, if not by me. I found her work like so
much of the actual series cold and unrelatable. Here Fanning has yet again
thrown caution to the wind (along with her clothes) and is hysterical and
lovable in every scene she's in and she's in most of them. She's on the
shortlist for an Emmy nomination this year and this time I have no problem with
it.
I've been joking ever since Big
Little Lies debuted that every actress of a certain age has appeared in one
of his show except his wife, Michelle Pfeiffer. Pfeiffer has basically been
taking a step back from acting for the last decade or so and only the past few
years has she finally ended up on TV. Here she is absolutely divine as
Shayanne, the definition of GMILF and almost immediately I remember why I'd
loved watching her in movies in the 1990s.
Even in her sixties Pfeiffer still
has the raw sexuality she had twenty five years ago and her work as Shayenne is
incredible as a woman who has made every mistake in the book and now realizes
her daughter has made the exact same ones. Almost from the start she draws a
line in the sand that she will not help Margo raise this child. She seems
determined to leave her alone to do so, out of a mix of love and good
parenting. She clearly loves Margo, even though she is the product of a one
night stand at a Hooters and she clearly wants to stop making mistakes.
So she's gotten involved with a
fairly religious man (a wonderful Greg Kinnear) who for all his relative
conservatism clearly worships the ground Shayanne walks on. Despite being
ham-handed he goes out of his way to ask for Margo's blessing before he
proposes to her mother and then does so with a very straight forwardness that
show's why there so different. (In Kelley fashion, it happens at an
Applebee's.) Of course minutes after that Margo's father arrives having finally
gotten her text message. "I thought you were dead," are the first
words out of her mouth.
Jinx is played by Nick Offerman
who gets to lean into his physicality and brawn in a way he rarely has over his
impressive career. (Ron Swanson could have just as easily come from Kelley's
pen as Amy Poehler's by the way.) He's clearly running from something as much
as to his daughter and Offerman gets to measure seriousness while chanting the
lines of any WWF fighter.
I know that there's a lot more
that's going to happen in a few episodes (the Only Fans part hasn't remotely
come into this) but honestly I don't
need any more details to love this show. Every level of it, from Kelley's
writing to the incredible cast, is one of those sheer joys that I rarely get in
even the best comedies. It's come in Abbott Elementary and Only
Murders in the Building and I've seen it more than enough in Shrinking (I
will get to Season 3) but Margo's is somehow on a different level. And I think its because it has the perfect
combination of Kelley's gifts of dialogue and getting incredible actors to read
them in a way he hasn't in a while. I haven't even gotten to how much fun it
was to see Marcia Gay Harden back on the screen and of course Nicole Kidman is
here as well (because what would a Kelley project be without her?)
The decision to both renew Margo's
Got Money Troubles for a second season and turn it into a comedy for the
Emmys this year are absolutely the right ones, at least after two episodes. Perhaps I will regret that decision down
the road but nothing he's done has led me astray. (Season 3 of Big Little
Lies is on its way this year!) In this case it's because Kelley has
remembered what he did so well for so long during the 1990s: make us laugh at
life's absurdities. And what's more absurd then sex, certainly from how he
showed it then and today?
My score: 4.75 stars.
No comments:
Post a Comment