In the opening scene of Margo’s Got Money Troubles episode six, we finally meet Hungry Ghost. Her chunky silver boots stomp down the street as she walks towards a theater. “World Premiere: Hungry Ghost” reads the marquee. She’s gigantic, larger than any building in the cityscape, green and sparkly, wearing a silver two-piece set and a dusty pink bouffant on her head.

She kneels down and peeks into the theater. Her giant eyeball hovers over the window, trying to catch a glimpse inside. Her face is on the big screen and on the phones of everyone in there. “I’ve crawled inside your phone. I live there now, forever,” she says. As soon as we hear her speak, we come back to the titular Margo Millet, played by Elle Fanning, typing out those words into her OnlyFans profile.

Margo is a college dropout who gets pregnant after having an affair with Mark (Michael Angarano), her married English professor. When the series begins, we are supposed to understand that Margo has undeniable talent but is languishing away at Fullerton College. But it’s not until two-thirds through the season that we really see her hunger for a creative life.

After a string of failed job interviews, Margo faces the ultimate single mom Catch-22: without a job, she can’t afford childcare, but without childcare, she can’t find a job. At her roommate’s suggestion, she starts an OnlyFans. Immediately, we see Margo take this new role seriously. She creates her persona, Hungry Ghost, finds her niche in describing penises as Pokémon, and eventually starts posting photos for her subscribers.

No longer bound by the constraints of academia or the predatory gaze of her professors, Margo is free to develop her own voice and point of view. But she’s still learning. In one of her first posts, she writes “boobs” in all-caps across her chest. In another, she wears a red latex mini dress. We get the sense that she’s trying on different personas and finding a way to make the nudity work for her.

The show offers an exciting look at the mix of labor and ambition that makes up the creator economy. Margo’s Got Money Troubles argues that creativity is a beast that must be fed, and that when traditional paths to art fail, the artist has to find her own outlet.

But the Apple TV series relies too much on Margo’s family drama to give us a modern take on who gets to be called an artist.

Margo is the only child of a professional wrestler, played by Nick Offerman, and a single mom, played by Michelle Pfeiffer. One opened the door to showmanship and fables, the other to storytelling as a way of rewriting reality.

When we meet her, she is stuck between her stories and a life she’d rather look away from. She wonders if her love of writing is a curse.

While in bed with her professor, he asks why she always writes in the third person. It’s a way to “have sympathy for the character,” she says. It also keeps her at arm’s length from her own story.

The show is a lesson in how that instinct survives. Hungry Ghost is Margo in the third person. It’s a character she builds so she can have sympathy for herself as she watches everyone around her disapprove of her choices.

The Barbarella-inspired costumes, the alien persona, the sci-fi erotica niche she carves out aren’t a departure from who Margo, the writer. They’re an extension of it: innocent and baby-brained is how she describes her character. “Everyone already thinks that I’m essentially a child. That I’m weird and naïve, why not lean into it?” she says.

Her father understands this better than anyone. Jinx spent his career playing a character inside a ring, building a persona audiences could project onto. He knows that the mask is a tool for writing stories with heroes and villains – and it takes sacrifice to tell them.

What the show does in its best moments is draw that line between Jinx’s wrestling persona and Margo’s OnlyFans one, between performance as survival and performance as art. They are, the show insists, the same thing.

In episode five, during a trip to Las Vegas for her mother’s wedding, Margo finally tells Shyanne about the OnlyFans. The fight that follows breaks the show open by bringing Margo back down to earth. Her mom isn’t mad about the nudity, though Margo insists it’s not pornography, or the fact that she hid it from her. Her mom is mad that Margo’s giving people a reason to look down on her, to judge her, and declare that she’s not good enough.

After the wedding, as Margo and her dad are sitting in their hotel room, she says, “I want to work on something big. I’m just not sure what yet.” She goes down to the pool and texts two other creators she’s been working with: “Let’s make some art.”

She’s been building Hungry Ghost for months, and the creative impulse is pulling her toward something she hasn’t named yet. Here, the show squanders an opportunity to let us into Margo’s world-building. We get a montage of her working on choreography, set design, and crafty mishaps played for laughs, but it’s the only time we really see her creating, with total freedom and complete control over her own vision.

Soon, her video goes viral and Margo is doxxed. The professor who wanted nothing to do with her or the baby suddenly reappears and initiates a custody battle. The picture with “boobs” written on her chest, done out of a survival instinct, becomes evidence. What was creativity and storytelling became Exhibit A.

The custody battle puts on trial the’s show’s central argument: that Margo’s creativity is real, that it counts, that her platform doesn’t diminish it. Mark, with his masculine, society-sanctioned sex-shaming power, tries to reframe everything — her work, her choices, her persona — in the worst possible light. Now someone else is telling her story in a courtroom for his own purposes.

But Margo’s Got Money Troubles keeps pulling back to the family — to Shyanne’s protectiveness, to Jinx’s relapse, to the village holding her up — instead of showing us who Margo is as an artist, how her father’s influence helps her understand the world behind a mask, and why OnlyFans became the place where she could nurture her creativity unburdened. With a second season now confirmed, that question is still open.

For now, Margo’s Got Money Troubles remains a show that’s braver in its premise than in its follow-through. If she’s so adamant that it’s not sex work or pornography, then what is it? And why would it be so bad for her if it were? The show hasn’t valued Margo’s art enough so far to answer those questions. Here’s hoping it adjusts its course.