Nick Offerman Was Born to Play Jinx

I love Rufi Thorpe’s Margo’s Got Money Troubles, which I have mentioned a few times on this site. It’s one of my favorite novels of the last five years. It’s really a found family novel about a woman, Margo, who reconnects with her estranged father, a former pro-wrestler named Jinx; forges a new relationship with her mother, a former Hooters waitress named Shyanne; and folds in her roommate, Susie, as well. It’s all in service of Bodhi, Margo’s baby from an unplanned pregnancy with her college lit professor, and it centers around Margo’s decision to earn a living through OnlyFans.

It is a remarkably sweet and funny novel, peopled with troubled souls trying to make the best of what life has handed them so that Bodhi can grow up with what Margo never had: a close-knit, supportive, and loving family. And through the first four episodes, David E. Kelley’s Apple TV+ adaptation is absolutely nailing it. Not to be dismissive of the effort it takes to adapt even a brilliant novel, but Margo’s Got Money Troubles is the kind of book where, if you find the right cast, the source material can take care of the rest — so long as the showrunner doesn’t tinker with it too much.

And this is a perfect cast: Elle Fanning is incredibly believable as a devoted mother who uses nudity as a vehicle for her creative writing; Michelle Pfeiffer is ideal as the still-sexy grandmother with a full life of her own outside of grandmotherhood; and even Greg Kinnear is well-cast as a slightly charming, slightly oily Christian not-so-subtly trying to reshape Shyanne into the woman he wants her to be, rather than the woman she is.

I love the whole thing, but the gooey center of the book — the guy you root for even as you sense a catastrophe quietly building — is Jinx, the former wrestler who walks out of rehab and shows up at Margo’s door a couple of months after she gives birth, asking not only for a place to stay but for the chance to be the supportive father to Margo that he couldn’t bring himself to be when she was a baby.

A few actors probably could’ve played this character, but I’m not sure anyone is as perfectly cast as Nick Offerman, a guy who radiates loving father-figure despite having no children of his own. Offerman is exactly the guy who wells up on a podcast with Amy Poehler when they start talking about his fatherly relationship with Aubrey Plaza. And that’s precisely what he brings to Jinx, who could’ve easily been reduced to a silly Macho Man Randy Savage caricature straight out of a Slim Jim commercial. Instead, Offerman imbues this big, burly guy with such tenderness that you can’t help but root for him — not only for Margo’s sake, but for his own.

This week’s episode of Margo’s Got Money Troubles is a pivotal one for his character, because it’s the episode where Margo brings Jinx into the OnlyFans fold. After he moves in with her, he quickly bonds with Bodhi and becomes essentially the apartment’s live-in manny. But when he walks in on Margo during an OnlyFans shoot, the show is smart enough to let him react like a traditional, judgmental father would: What are you doing? How can you do this? This isn’t you. What will your son think?

Setting that up is what makes the pivot land so well. Jinx takes Margo to one of his old wrestling conventions so she can get to know the man he used to be. He’s embraced by the crowd, spars in a wrestling match with a friendly rival (played by Nicole Kidman), and tweaks his back — the injury that first sent him spiraling down his addiction path.

But the important thing is what returning to the ring teaches him: that “we’re all putting on a show.” He apologizes for being judgmental. And we understand that his judgment came from a protective instinct — the same instinct he redirects, with considerably less ambivalence, toward the college lit professor who got Margo pregnant. The show wants Jinx to reckon with the fact that what Margo is doing isn’t that different from how he made his own living, and it earns that reckoning.

It works so brilliantly because Nick Offerman radiates protective father, but he’s also a man who would never let that instinct override his trust in the people he loves. It’s a different iteration of Ron Swanson — the diehard libertarian who fought against government spending right up until it was hurting his friends, whom he trusted to use that money wisely.

It is so good. He is so good. And so is Margo’s Got Money Troubles — the OnlyFans Shrinking, a show where characters exist to lift each other up and hold each other together, even if the socioeconomic circumstances are about three rungs lower. If you haven’t started it yet, that’s the only thing about your week worth fixing.