Twenty-eight-year-old Elle Fanning has been nominated for an Academy Award (Sentimental Value) and a Primetime Emmy (The Great) and has co-headlined a Disney flick that grossed three-quarters of a billion dollars (Maleficent). Yet, the role with which I instinctively associate her is her work as a backyard film “star” in J.J. Abrams’s 2011 thriller, Super 8. There, cast as the plucky child of troubled parents, the then-13-year-old was utterly convincing as a young woman on the brink of possibility or disaster. Though the timeline doesn’t quite fit, a grown-up version of that character could easily be the lead of Apple TV’s winning new show. 

Margo’s Got Money Troubles stars Fanning as Margo Millet, a doe-eyed coed lured into bed by predatory English prof Mark Gable (Michael Angarano). Seduced, like millions before her, by her lover’s bad poetry (“We are a hungry sheep on a green plane”), Margo falls helplessly into an affair, an assignation that eventually leaves her pregnant, broke, and banished from California’s Fullerton College. How this happens in the age of the Title IX office and the student-development Karen is never quite clear. Mark’s idea of discretion is to close his office blinds when Margo visits. Nonetheless, by the end of the first episode, Margo is possessed of a squalling babe with no means to support him. As a doleful Mark observes during a later exchange, “This has become very real.”