Martha Stewart
Martha Stewart is an actor, born 1941.
Nothing in this filmography is the actual career. Martha Stewart is a retail businesswoman, writer and television personality who founded Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia and turned home and hospitality into publishing, broadcasting, merchandising and e-commerce at once. She published Martha Stewart Living magazine, wrote a long run of bestselling books, hosted Martha Stewart Living from 1993 to 2004 and then The Martha Stewart Show from 2005 to 2012, and won a Daytime Emmy along the way.
What lands her on a film and television site is a second, stranger career built entirely on playing herself. She appears as Martha Stewart in Men in Black II, in Pixels, in The Great Buck Howard, and as a guest or judge on Chopped, MasterChef Junior, Say Yes to the Dress, 2 Broke Girls and How To with John Wilson. That is a filmography of cameos, but it is also evidence of something real: by the early 2000s her name functioned as shorthand a screenwriter could use without explanation, which is a level of cultural saturation almost no lifestyle figure reaches.
The interesting late move is that she got in on the joke. The Comedy Central Roast of Justin Bieber put her on a dais trading insults, and Martha & Snoop's Potluck Dinner Party paired her with Snoop Dogg for a cooking show that ran on the comic gap between them. Both work because she plays her own public image with a completely straight face.
Movies (5)
TV (16)
- The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon (2014)
- Late Night with Seth Meyers (2014)
- 2 Broke Girls (2011)
- Late Night with Conan O'Brien (1993)
- The Soup (2004)
- Chopped (2009)
- Today (1952)
- Jay Leno's Garage (2015)
- Comedy Central Roasts (2003)
- Martha & Snoop's Potluck Dinner Party (2016)
- Some Good News (2020)
- The Marriage Ref (2010)
- MasterChef Junior (2013)
- America: The Story of Us (2010)
- How To with John Wilson (2020)
- Say Yes to the Dress (2007)
Where to start with Martha Stewart
Skip the cameos and start with Martha & Snoop's Potluck Dinner Party, which is the only title here where she is genuinely performing rather than appearing. The chemistry is real, the format is loose, and her timing is much better than it has any right to be.
Then Comedy Central Roast of Justin Bieber, for the same reason. Watching someone with a decades-old brand for immaculate taste stand up and be filthy is the best joke on this page.
The scripted appearances are short but two are fun: Men in Black II uses her name as a punchline, and Pixels does the same with less wit. The Great Buck Howard gives her a slightly more textured version of the same gag.
For the daytime side, Chopped and MasterChef Junior show the judge persona in its natural setting, and How To with John Wilson is the strangest and best thing on the list.
The food and lifestyle television
Four decades of American daytime and food television, most of it built around her own competence. The Snoop Dogg show is the one worth watching, because it is the first time anyone let her be the straight man in her own format.
The comedy appearances
The public reinvention happened on other people's shows. The Bieber roast is where it turned, an audience discovering she is genuinely filthy and completely deadpan. How To with John Wilson gives her the strangest cameo of the lot.