Why OnlyFans Is Suddenly Everywhere on TV

Elle Fanning’s character on Margo’s Got Money Troubles paints her entire body metallic green. She’s building a persona — an earthside alien named The Hungry Ghost — who offers mild nudity and withering critiques of her subscribers’ genitalia. It’s absurd, it’s funny, and it’s completely of this moment. Because Margo isn’t joining OnlyFans for thrills. She’s a single mom who lost her restaurant job and needs to feed her infant son.

That’s the story TV keeps telling right now. And it’s not a coincidence.

OnlyFans has quietly become the defining plot device of this television season. It’s driving Sydney Sweeney’s Cassie toward a chaotic kind of stardom on Euphoria. It surfaces in a storyline on HBO’s Industry. Even Janine Teagues — Quinta Brunson’s relentlessly optimistic second-grade teacher on ABC’s Abbott Elementary, arguably the most wholesome show on television — briefly considers signing up for a thinly veiled knockoff called “MostlyFans” when her job looks uncertain. The platform has gone from punchline to plot engine, and the through line across every single one of these stories is the same: the traditional economy isn’t working.

“You see the rise of hustle culture, and it could look like driving for DoorDash or driving for Uber, or it could look like OnlyFans,” said Rufi Thorpe, the author of the 2024 novel on which Apple TV+’s Margo’s Got Money Troubles is based. “But people are trying desperately to afford their rent.”

Thorpe started writing the book after watching OnlyFans explode during the pandemic — a moment when millions of people lost income overnight and started looking for alternatives. The “increasing financial hardship in this country,” she said, has everything to do with why a platform like this has become so culturally relevant. A recent CNN poll backs that up: most Americans are pessimistic about the economy, cutting back on spending including groceries, while inflation continues to eat into wages and job seekers across most industries face a brutal market. The characters on these shows aren’t anomalies. They’re mirrors.

From Victims to Entrepreneurs: How TV’s Portrayal of Sex Work Is Shifting

For decades, sex workers on television existed almost exclusively as victims — bodies found in the first ten minutes of a procedural, cautionary tales to be solved and forgotten. What’s happening this season is genuinely different. These characters are making a calculated economic choice, the same way someone might pick up a second job or start selling things on Etsy. The platform gives them something the gig economy often doesn’t: a significant cut of their own labor. According to OnlyFans’ creator policy, creators keep 80% of their earnings — and those who make more than $600 a year receive a 1099 tax form.

That last detail matters more than it might seem. Bridget Crawford, a law professor at Pace University who has published research on the economics of OnlyFans, says that receiving a tax form is genuinely meaningful to many creators. Their goal, she said, is to feel “like any other worker.” Having documented income means being able to rent an apartment, qualify for a loan, build a financial life. It’s the mundane infrastructure of legitimacy — and it’s exactly what Fanning’s Margo is chasing.

Every model Thorpe spoke with while researching the show had joined OnlyFans for one reason. “I think that’s the predominant reason why anyone does sex work,” she said simply. The money.

What Real Creators Are Actually Making

Gracie Canaan knows this better than most. A comedian and OnlyFans creator who cohosts Audible’s OnlyFantasy podcast, she made $4,000 in her first month on the platform — offering what she describes as “the girlfriend experience,” which included “bikini level nudity,” “some nudes,” and character role play. Last year, she cleared over $100,000.

Canaan is quick to point out she’s not among the platform’s top earners — the site’s highest-profile creators can pull in millions per month, though OnlyFans doesn’t release data on what most people make. But she’s earning more than she did at her previous corporate job, which gives her a particular kind of clarity about the moment we’re in.

“Being in corporate America and seeing that crumble, and then being like — OnlyFans is actually more stable than this thing that I was taught to believe was this smart, safe thing to do — is wild,” she said.

She also pushes back on the idea that creative fulfillment and financial necessity have to be in conflict. “This is something I want to keep doing,” she said. “And I know from having jobs that I hate, that in order for me to keep doing it, I have to really enjoy it and the way I find joy from it is being creative.”

As for why these TV storylines are landing so hard right now, Canaan thinks it’s a combination of economic anxiety and a genuine cultural shift in how people understand the platform. “That stigma has been chipped away over time,” she said. “It’s now the point where it’s interesting enough without being as taboo as it used to be.”

Euphoria’s Messy, Complicated Take

No show has leaned into the OnlyFans moment harder — or more chaotically — than Euphoria. Cassie, played by Sweeney, initially joins the platform with a very specific goal: she wants an extra $50,000 for flowers at her wedding. What follows is a full spiral into the content machine, complete with a housekeeper helping her film and a scene in which she poses as an adult baby — a moment that drew real backlash from actual OnlyFans creators, who called the portrayal “troublesome” and said depicting the platform as a place that would permit that kind of content was a “serious problem.” OnlyFans explicitly prohibits any content involving age-related role-play.

Creator Sam Levinson has said the show was deliberately going for “a layer of absurdity” in Cassie’s journey — which tracks with how Euphoria has always operated. But the criticism points to a real tension in how fiction handles a platform that real people depend on for real income.

Nobody on the show has more credibility to weigh in on this than Chloe Cherry, who plays Faye and is herself a former adult film star and OnlyFans model. In a recent interview with Refinery29, Cherry was characteristically blunt about why she thinks the platform has become so normalized. “It has nothing to do with empowerment or power or anything,” she said. “Capitalism and the economy getting worse” — that’s the driver. She called OnlyFans “a weird phenomenon of the 2020s that we will look back on and be very confused by.”

Maybe. Or maybe we’ll look back and recognize it as exactly what it was: a generation of people finding a way to survive a system that wasn’t built for them, and a season of television honest enough to show it.

As Cassie put it in a recent episode: “This is the business world of today.”