The Apprentice: Martha Stewart

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The Apprentice: Martha Stewart
Genre	Reality television
Presented by	Martha Stewart
Country of origin	United States
Original language	English
No. of seasons	1
No. of episodes	13
Production
Executive producers	Mark Burnett Jay Bienstock Donald Trump Conrad Riggs Kevin Harris
Running time	60 minutes
Production company	Mark Burnett Productions
Original release
Network	NBC
Release	September 21 (2005-09-21) – December 21, 2005 (2005-12-21)
Infobox instructions (only shown in preview)

The Apprentice: Martha Stewart is an American reality television series broadcast by NBC. Hosted by businesswoman Martha Stewart, the series premiered on September 21, 2005, and concluded with its thirteenth episode on December 21, 2005.

Tasks were centered on Stewart's areas of expertise: media, culinary arts, entertaining, decorating, crafts, design, merchandising, and style. The tone of the show was somewhat muted compared to the original, as Stewart brought her own sensibilities to the elimination process, often simply saying goodbye, in contrast to original series host Donald Trump's catchphrase: "You're fired." She also wrote a cordial letter to the candidate who was fired; many times she took subtle jabs at the fired candidate and gave frank reasons for why the candidate did not succeed on the show. Several segments featuring Stewart were filmed at her home in Bedford, New York because at the time, she was serving the five-month house arrest portion of her ImClone scandal conviction.^[1]

Donald Trump, Mark Burnett and Jay Bienstock executive produced the show. Businessman Charles Koppelman and Stewart's daughter, Alexis Stewart accompanied the two teams during tasks and reported their observations to Stewart in the boardroom.^[1]

The two teams, Matchstick and Primarius, competed in 11 challenges. Overall, Primarius won eight, while Matchstick (candidates were reshuffled after Matchstick lost several times in a row) won only three.

The show's theme song is "Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)" by Eurythmics. The logo is a businesswoman in a dress running with a bag instead of a businessman running with a briefcase. The background music is written by David Vanacore, Mark T, Williams, and Jeff Lippencott.

Despite the fairly big initial hype, ratings for the spin-off were relatively weak. This show averaged only 7 million viewers, and garnered a mediocre 2.5 average in the very important demographic of 18- to 49-year-old viewers. However, this program aired against very tough competition, including ABC's massive hit Lost. After the second episode, the show was moved from the 8 p.m. time slot to the 9 p.m. slot, and in spite of facing Lost, saw a slight increase in ratings.

There have been numerous rumors thrown out as to why the show failed, including: "too much" Martha Stewart (her Martha daytime program and this prime time program), confusion between this version and Trump's version which airs the day after (on Thursday nights), apathy over reality shows in general, NBC's declining fortunes, fatigue with the Apprentice franchise itself, and weak casting, although some felt the cast was superior to Apprentice 4, which ran concurrently. Trump blamed the Martha series for the declining ratings of his own version, even though the ratings for his show began to fall over a year before Martha's version premiered. Stewart responded in turn that she was supposed to have "fired" Trump in the premiere episode, making her a successor to Trump rather than the host of a spinoff. In mid-November 2005, NBC announced that it would not bring back the show for a second season, although the network and Stewart claimed that the show was initially planned as a one-season endeavor.

Within a few years of the end of the series, three of the top runners-up (Bethenny, Marcela, and Leslie) were participating in other television ventures, with second-place finisher Bethenny Frankel parlaying her fame from the inaugural cast The Real Housewives of New York City into further reality shows, television hosting, books, and a successful business, Skinnygirl Cocktails. Fourth-place finisher Ryan Danz appeared on the 21st season of The Amazing Race alongside his girlfriend Abbie Ginsberg. They finished in 5th place.^[2] A third contestant, Shawn Killinger, would go on to be a popular on air host at QVC.