If you happen to, like me, are watching each “Euphoria” Season 3 and the debut season of “Margo’s Received Cash Troubles,” you will have seen one thing: the previous present fails on the very factor that the latter does completely. What I imply by that’s “Margot’s Received Cash Troubles” depicts a personality participating in intercourse work in a considerate, empathetic, and empowering method, and the third season of “Euphoria” seems to be a humiliation ritual for Sydney Sweeney.
Admittedly, “Margo” has an unfair benefit in its story. Whereas “Euphoria” comes completely from the twisted thoughts of Sam Levinson, “Margo” is predicated on the best-selling novel of the identical identify by Rufi Thorpe (a novel I occur to like and wholeheartedly advocate). In each variations of “Margo,” our titular Margo Millet, performed by lately minted Oscar nominee Elle Fanning, has an affair together with her school professor and will get pregnant. Deciding to maintain the child, Margo offers beginning to a son named Bodhi … however after her roommates transfer out over the crying new child, and she or he will get fired from her job, Margo finds herself in a large monetary bind. When she begins score males’s bathing swimsuit areas on an nameless OnlyFans account beneath the identify HungryGhost — and evaluating these areas to Pokémon with more and more intelligent analyses — she begins discovering success, and finally ends up linking up with different creators to make a dwelling.
Then there’s “Euphoria” Season 3, the place Sweeney’s Cassie Howard, ostensibly all “grown up” after a five-year time leap, dabbles in grownup content material on her personal earlier than linking up together with her highschool bestie Maddy Perez (Alexa Demie) for assist together with her new line of labor. In the end, although, it is about the way in which these exhibits deal with Margo and Cassie … with kindness in a single case and derision within the different.
Cassie Howard’s journey to date in Euphoria Season 3 does not give her any company
Cassie Howard has by no means precisely been an aspirational determine on “Euphoria,” whether or not we’re studying that she gave up her goals of changing into a determine skater after her father left the Howard household or watching her obsess over Maddy’s on-again, off-again boyfriend Nate Jacobs (Jacob Elordi) throughout the HBO present’s second season. In Season 3, it appears, at first, like Cassie has every little thing she’s ever needed. She and Nate stay in an unlimited and gaudy home and are getting married (although Cassie does throw form of a match over the marriage flowers, insisting she wants the preparations that value $50,000), however she’s nonetheless, as Rue tells us in a voiceover, misplaced.
“It was a disgrace she was with Nate. Cassie was the type of lady Maddy dreamed of signing,” Rue says of Maddy’s try and grow to be a supervisor of OnlyFans fashions and go away her assistant job behind. “Lovely, however directionless. So determined for consideration, she’s keen to humiliate herself. These are the type of women you’ll be able to actually mine.” Later in that second episode, “America My Dream” — wherein Cassie is in a child costume full with a diaper and pacifier, her legs unfold broad — Maddy tells Cassie that her “horny canine” video will not get her very far. “Yeah, the doggie video? It is enjoyable, and it is campy, nevertheless it’s not horny, and it isn’t timeless. It simply feels determined. It feels such as you’re making an attempt method too exhausting.”
We need not attempt too exhausting to unpack what “Euphoria” is saying about Cassie writ massive right here. The present thinks she’s determined, silly, and unhappy. That is why having her grow to be an OnlyFans mannequin is demeaning. Margo, alternatively? She’s an entrepreneur.
Margo’s Received Cash Troubles treats its protagonist with respect, not like Euphoria
Okay, so a part of this does come down to at least one issue: Elle Fanning is, by each conceivable metric, a greater actress than Sydney Sweeney. Argue with me all you need. That is only a truth. Nonetheless, I can not think about a world the place even somebody as gifted as Fanning might efficiently promote the storyline given to Sweeney in Season 3 of “Euphoria,” as a result of it is vapid, empty, and even merciless. On the finish of the day, it is disrespectful — not simply to actual grownup content material creators on the market on the earth, however to Sweeney and Cassie.
That is the place “Margo’s Received Cash Troubles” does one thing very proper: it affords real empathy and respect to Margo, a younger girl who finds herself in an unattainable scenario and finds a productive and, frankly, financially profitable approach to deal with it. (Additionally, the montage within the fourth episode, titled “Buddies,” the place Margo varieties out a sequence of Pokémon descriptors to explain varied photos of men’ junk, is actually humorous.) Margo does not do all of this completely on her personal.
Her one remaining roommate, Susie (Thaddea Graham), vegetation the thought in her head, and despite the fact that her former wrestler dad, Jinx (a wonderfully solid Nick Offerman), is horrified at first, he finally apologizes to Margo for judging her so harshly … and he is all the time recreation to babysit for Bodhi. In “Buddies,” Margo additionally hyperlinks up with these aforementioned creators, whose usernames we can not print right here however who, within the novel, grow to be her discovered household.
“Margo’s Received Cash Troubles” tells a well-recognized and heartwarming story with a contemporary and raunchy spin, whereas “Euphoria” goals for shock and awe. That is why “Margo,” which is streaming on Apple TV, succeeds the place “Euphoria,” on HBO Max, flounders.
