Meet the top 1% of OnlyFans creators: the ‘revolutionary’ reality show exploring modern sex work

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Turned On: Dirty Sexy Money episode two still featuring Lily Phillips and Annie Knight
OnlyFans creators Lily Phillips and Annie Knight, who are known as ‘stunt girls’ for controversy-courting feats like sleeping with hundreds of men in a day on camera. Photograph: Stan

Turned On: Dirty Sexy Money is not high art, but it is completely engrossing to see sex workers allowed to tell their own story

In her first three days on OnlyFans, Mia Bailey made A$25,000 (£13,200, US$17,500). She posted her debut video on a Friday afternoon, quit her corporate job the next Monday, then began pulling in $800,000 a year on the adult content platform. She has numberplates that read YOU WI5H and a no-expense-spared wedding to plan, but there’s also a growing rift with her family and friendships that keep blowing up in her face.

Welcome to the world of top-earning OnlyFans creators – and my new favourite reality TV show.

Stan’s Turned On: Dirty Sexy Money (TODSM) launched earlier this year. To my disappointment the show doesn’t seem to have made a big splash, despite boasting the most intriguing reality premise in years – a look at an industry that, to paraphrase one cast member, everyone thinks they know about but few actually do. It follows a group of Gold Coast-based adult content creators represented by one agency, each of whom earn enough to rank among the top 1% of users on the platform.

And what a compelling group they are. There is Mia, who quickly becomes a very captivating villain. There’s April and Amelia Maddison, identical twins who must fastidiously keep their appearance as matching as possible, because their income (around $3m a year for two days of work a week) dips if one of them gets a haircut. There’s Ruby Drew and Chloe Mira, who worked in strip clubs before making the jump to online.

At the helm of it all is Quinn Everly, the agency’s business-savvy founder, who makes so much money that her doctor husband quit his job to work for her instead – much to the chagrin of his mother. Also represented by the agency is Quinn’s little sister Hayley Summers, who is frustrated that she can’t earn as much as other creators because she doesn’t want to have sex on camera, preferring to only do solo content.

Already fascinated? I was! But a huge blow-up at the end of the first episode changes the course of the show. Mia spits the dummy, dramatically exits the agency and starts hanging out with two different OnlyFans creators, Annie Knight and Lily Phillips. TODSM picks up six months later and follows not only the schism between Mia and her former agency friends but a bigger, season-long battle between the agency girls and Annie and Lily, “stunt girls”, as Hayley calls them, known for controversy-courting feats such as sleeping with hundreds of men in a day on camera.

The agency girls feel that the stunt girls have, among other issues, brought an avalanche of bad press to adult content creators, forcing them to contend with a level of hate they didn’t face before. For the stunt girls, these gimmicks are purely business (they attract a lot of attention, which equates to new subscribers), and it’s disappointing for their colleagues to say one type of sex work is OK, but not another.

Because this is first and foremost a reality show, there is, of course, plenty of drama – drinks are thrown and friendships ended. But what really sets TODSM apart is this engrossing peek behind the curtain at modern sex work, from the nuts and bolts of OnlyFans success through to the bigger-picture ramifications of the job. We see Mia’s estrangement from her family, who cannot accept her career choice. Annie has a potential stalker and neighbours who want her off their street. Hayley, who is single and dreams of becoming a mother, looks for love among men who only see her as a novelty first date to brag to their friends about. But she also describes the job as something that changed her life for the better in many ways.

TODSM doesn’t hold back about the industry, but it does not moralise either. It feels revolutionary to have a reality show that so honestly allows sex workers to tell their own story, just laying out the good and bad as it is. I would love to see future seasons explore what life looks like for the other 99% of OnlyFans creators, who are sold a dream of quick, easy money that has already died, and according to Blue Rose Talent earn an average of USD$180 a month on what is now an oversaturated platform. But I’m getting ahead of myself, as the show is not yet renewed for a second season.

I won’t claim TODSM is high art – just look at those hilariously bad opening credits – but if it is relegated to the long list of reality TV’s one-season wonders (vale, Ladies of London reboot) I will forever wonder what happened next for these women. In just nine episodes, the cast have left me craving something an OnlyFans subscription can’t buy: their real lives.