When the Primetime Emmy Awards are broadcast Monday, Sept. 14, the city of Fullerton won’t be getting any awards. But it has something that is arguably better: a starring role in “Margo’s Got Money Troubles,” a first-year series from Apple TV+ that is nominated for eight awards, including Best Comedy.
Oh, sure, it doesn’t have the showbiz name cachet of showrunner David Kelley or the actors with nominations from the show this year – Elle Fanning, Nick Offerman and Michelle Pfeiffer – but Orange County’s fourth-oldest city, incorporated in 1904, gets plenty of screen time in the eight-episode debut season, which premiered in April 2026.
Fullerton locations ranging from Fullerton College and the Fox Theatre to iconic restaurants and a car wash are featured in the show. And although filming also took place in locales ranging from Sherman Oaks and Las Vegas to a Universal Studios soundstage, the show, in which a college freshman gets pregnant by her professor and turns to OnlyFans to support her child, is mostly set in Fullerton.
The city is woven into the story, with Margo (Elle Fanning) attending Fullerton College, living a couple of blocks from the Fox Theatre and working in a now-closed Italian restaurant, and familiar local landmarks popping up as Easter eggs throughout the series’ seven episodes.
There are several reasons for this.
Rufi Thorpe, who wrote the 2024 novel the show is based on, based the book in Fullerton. Thorpe grew up in Corona del Mar but was familiar with Fullerton, she told the L.A. Times in June of this year. In the same article, series cinematographer Tari Segal said the city’s distinctive visual identity was another reason for filming in Fullerton.
“Fullerton, like many smaller towns of Southern California, has a very specific and time-capsuled look that helped us in framing Margo’s world,” Segal said.
In that same article, cinematographer Carl Herse agreed, saying that what the filmmakers were looking for was “a world of palm trees and stucco, doughnut shops and car washes, the blinding sunlight in a place not nearly as romanticized as other parts of the state.”
Even the light made a difference.
“There is a particular quality of light and strength of shadows in Orange County, and it has a personality all its own,” Herse said.
The Fullerton locations used in “Margo” are also inside “The Ring” – the Studio Zone (aka the TMZ), the 30-mile radius centered at Beverly Boulevard and La Cienega Boulevard in Los Angeles used in film-industry labor agreements to determine things such as crew travel, per diem and other working conditions.
Parts of Fullerton are inside that ring, making the city accessible to productions without the additional considerations that can apply to locations outside the zone.
Local Connection
But perhaps the biggest reason why Fullerton received such a key role in filming is Dylan Kirkland, the show’s location manager, who grew up in Anaheim and lived in Fullerton in the 1990s while attending Cal State Fullerton.
Kirkland, who was given an advance copy of Thorpe’s book before it was published, said that while no specific locations are mentioned other than Fullerton College, he immediately began associating locations with it.
“I immediately felt a connection with my brain and heart with what (Thorpe) was describing, Kirkland said. “I was thinking while reading, ‘Oh, this is set here, this is set there.”
His familiarity with the city, and passion for wanting to film in the city, was a huge factor in getting the cast and crew to set up shop for eight days of shooting in early 2025. He also thinks that he opened some eyes to the charm of downtown Fullerton.
“One of the best parts of the experience was taking so many Los Angeles-based and international cast and crew members to a place they knew little or nothing about,” Kirkland said. “I would say ‘Orange County,’ and I would hear people groan because that had no real experience or (realistic) expectation of what it would be like. But when we would drive up Harbor (Boulevard) and dip underneath those train tracks (into downtown), they would be transported.”
Here is a rundown of Fullerton locales used in the filming.
The Library-Learning Center on the Fullerton College campus. Photo by Joel Beers, Culture OC 
The Fullerton College pedestrian bridge over East Chapman Avenue. Photo by Joel Beers, Culture OC 
Inside the walkway of the Fullerton College pedestrian bridge over East Chapman Avenue. Photo by Joel Beers, Culture OC
Fullerton College
Though it is only shown in the first two episodes, Fullerton College, which is the only specific site mentioned in Thorpe’s novel, helps establish the world of the series. This is the college that aspiring creative writer Margo attends, and it’s where she has an affair with an English professor that winds up giving her so many problems after she becomes pregnant.
The actual school locations include the pedestrian overpass crossing Chapman Avenue that leads to the college’s counseling center, bookstore, Extended Opportunity Programs and Services (EOPS) and night classes, as well as a new performing arts center being constructed on the corner of Lemon and Chapman avenues. There’s also a beautiful establishing shot of the Fullerton College library.
Fullerton College, established in 1913 with only 24 students, is California’s oldest continually operating community college. Its original library was ultimately replaced by a new 67,680-square-foot Library and Learning Resources Center, which opened in 2005. The new building was constructed on the site of the former Student Union, giving the campus a modern library while preserving the college’s Spanish Colonial Revival character.
And Fullerton College wasn’t merely standing in for itself. The college newspaper, the Hornet, reported that a location scout from A24, the production company that worked with Apple TV+ on the series, approached the college in winter 2024 about filming the series. The production spent three days on campus, two shooting days and one cleanup day, and generated approximately $52,000 for the Friends of Fullerton College Foundation, which provides scholarships to students.
Exterior of the Fox Fullerton, 2025. Two other properties are part of the Fox Complex, a two-story Tea Room to the far left and a retail space to the right. Photo courtesy of Fullerton Historic Theatre Foundation/Todd Huffman 
The courtyard in front of the Fox Theatre on North Harbor Boulevard. Photo by Joel Beers, Culture OC
Fox Fullerton Theatre
The sign atop this venerable building is shown throughout the series. An exterior scene was filmed outside it, while a dream sequence in the episode’s third scene was filmed inside.
The Fox Fullerton Theatre opened in 1925 as Chapman’s Alician Court Theatre and quickly became Orange County’s premier movie palace. Designed by the same firm responsible for Hollywood’s Egyptian and Chinese theaters, the Fox presented silent films, vaudeville, concerts and, beginning in 1929, talkies. After closing in 1987, it became the focus of a decades-long grassroots preservation campaign. The Fullerton Historic Theatre Foundation purchased it in 2005, and restoration continues with the goal of returning the landmark to regular entertainment use.
Kirkland, who moved to Fullerton after the theater’s closure in 1987, still has fond memories of the building. He used to muse with fellow students about how cool it would be to shoot films inside or outside the theater, and he and a few friends even volunteered during the earliest efforts to save the theater from demolition.
Rutabegorz Restaurant. Photo by Joel Beers, Culture OC 
The dining room at Rutabegorz Restaurant. Photo by Joel Beers, Culture OC
Rutabegorz
Used as an interior shot in a key scene early in the series between Margo and her mother (Michelle Pfeiffer), Rutabegorz began in 1970 when four Cal State Fullerton students set out to create a bohemian coffeehouse modeled on the counterculture cafés of New York and San Francisco. It introduced espresso and cappuccino to many Orange County diners long before specialty coffee became ubiquitous. The original restaurant seated 25, but it has expanded to the north and west and now has an occupancy of 125.
It is also one of Fullerton’s oldest continuing restaurants, with only AJ’s Burgers, Polly’s Pies and the Cellar older. And maybe George’s.
But the restaurant’s location has even deeper roots. It was formerly a doctor’s office and residence, and LAist reports that a historical marker at the restaurant says the doctor was the first to administer penicillin to a patient in Southern California.
The Welcome to Downtown Fullerton Bridge
The Welcome to Downtown Fullerton bridge over Harbor Boulevard as one enters downtown is a piece of public art that doubles as a nod to the city’s railroad past. Built in 1997, the concrete railroad overpass was deliberately modeled after the Pacific Electric bridge that crossed Harbor Boulevard at Berkeley Avenue from 1917 to 1964.
The original bridge carried Pacific Electric’s famous Red Cars, as well as freight trains hauling Fullerton’s citrus. The modern bridge recreates that vanished landmark, making the welcome sign more than civic decoration; it’s essentially a three-dimensional historical footnote greeting drivers as they enter downtown.
A close-up of the front door of Angelo’s and Vinci’s. Photo by Joel Beers, Culture OC 
The front door of now closed Angelo’s and Vinci’s at the corner of North Harbor Boulevard and East Ellis Place. Photo by Joel Beers, Culture OC
Angelo’s and Vinci’s
When he first read Thorpe’s book, Kirkland was convinced from the description of Margo’s workplace that it was Heroes, located in downtown Fullerton’s SOCO District. But in the series, it is Angelo & Vinci’s, an iconic Italian restaurant in the same structure as the Fox Fullerton. And that couldn’t have pleased Kirkland more.
“I loved A&V’s,” he said, “and I would tell anyone who would listen that it was where my friend’s 18th birthday was held, and my college graduation dinner, and my second date.”
Despite reports to the contrary, no filming was done in the interior, as the restaurant closed in August 2023, nearly two years before filming of the series. The lively interior scenes were actually filmed in a Los Angeles Italian restaurant, but an exterior shot of the restaurant was used.
Angelo’s and Vinci’s Ristorante was a Fullerton institution for 52 years, beginning in 1971 as a small Italian café in the Fox Theatre complex. Founded by actor, dancer and choreographer Steven Peck, it moved into a much larger building next door in 1992. The restaurant became famous for its elaborate, theatrical décor – part Italian village, part Hollywood museum, part fever dream with themed rooms, family memorabilia, movie-star photographs and even a Monster Wine Cellar.
Plans are to convert the building into the Fox Block, a mixed-use restaurant, retail and entertainment district surrounding the historic Fox Theatre.
Fullerton Car Wash
Fullerton Car Wash has been a local fixture since 1994. Its somewhat prosaic name is almost perfectly Fullerton: no marketing poetry, just a car wash with an eye-catching mural on the exterior.
124 W. Union Ave.
This apartment building is where Margo lives and where many of the notable moments in the series take place. While the interiors were most likely shot on a soundstage in Universal City, the exterior, including the address, is quite visible in the series, and views of the sign atop the Fox Fullerton and its pool were shot from its balcony.
A non-authoritative renter website lists the two-story, 14-unit property as having been built in 1957, which makes sense as Cal State Fullerton would officially open two years later and the city’s population was booming, with more than 11,000 dwelling units built during the decade, comprising about 23 percent of the city’s current housing stock.
For a comprehensive look at what was going on in and around the city of Fullerton around that time, check out local historian Jesse La Tour’s excellent website.
Other Fullerton Connections
Hooters and the Maverick Theatre
Hooters, the aptly named sports bar and restaurant chain founded in 1983, isn’t pictured in the series, but it is a key reference, as it is where Margo’s mother and father first met. The chain had several locations in Orange County, but the most plausible one for the series was located near Angel Stadium, about 6 miles from Fullerton, which closed around 2021.
The Maverick Theatre isn’t referenced at all in the series, but after a scene atop the Welcome to Downtown Fullerton bridge was filmed, the cast and crew beat the heat by huddling in the theater, which is located at the bridge’s eastern terminus, right across from the Fullerton Transportation Center. Maverick head Brian Newell said actor Nick Offerman was particularly taken with the art deco theater.
Locations That Didn’t Meet the Cut
Scenes were shot at B&B Donuts, a 24-hour shop on Harbor Boulevard near the 91 freeway, and Villa del Sol, a beautiful Spanish Colonial Revival building that began life in 1922 as the California Hotel, but they didn’t make the final cut. And there were ideas to film at The Old Spaghetti Factory and Hillcrest Park, but logistical issues made both impractical.
Keiko Green
And while not quite a direct connection to Fullerton, playwright Keiko Green, who wrote episode six, has been establishing artistic roots in Orange County. She established her Orange County connection as a resident playwright at Anaheim’s Chance Theater in 2023. Her play “You Are Cordially Invited to the End of the World!” was staged last year at South Coast Repertory. This fall, Chance Theater will stage the California premiere of her play “The Bed Trick,” a contemporary comedy that wrestles with Shakespeare’s infamous “bed trick” in “All’s Well That Ends Well” from Sept. 11-Oct. 4.
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