What Fall Canning Season Might Mean for Stewart

Martha Stewart is endlessly successful, and unavoidable to boot.

Martha Stewart has destroyed her career.

Martha is coming back huger than ever.

Martha's not that big anymore.

And there you have one of the problems with conventional wisdom -- it's forever in flux; each of the above assessments has been widespread at some point over the past few years. In fact, few public figures have fluctuated more wildly on that scale than Stewart, who's widely regarded as either America's Comfort Queen or its Kitchen Witch, or maybe a little bit of each.

There's room for debate about the size of Stewart's current public following and her future as a prime-time TV commodity. But a little more than a month ago, she was on a roll by almost any standard: Her ankle bracelet came off on Sept. 1 -- she was completing a nearly six-month term of home confinement after serving five months in prison for lying to authorities about a stock deal. And she, along with her producer, the highly successful Mark Burnett ("Survivor"), and seemingly all of NBC, was looking forward to the Sept. 21 debut of her big prime-time reality show, "The Apprentice: Martha Stewart."

A colder reality emerged with the Sept. 22 overnight ratings. Stewart and her "Apprentice" had landed with a large and unexpected splat.

NBC would put that differently, but in other quarters there is little disagreement. Variety has called the show the biggest bomb of the new season. Heralding as it did Stewart's return to public life -- and her first regular incursion into prime time -- the series was one of the highest-profile of the new season, and yet its debut attracted only 7.1 million viewers. Week 2 saw a falloff to 6.1 million. Reruns of "Lost" airing opposite the show on ABC were drawing about twice the viewership. By the second week, Stewart's "Apprentice" placed fourth in the time slot.

"There was a lot of talk about her comeback," says Lisa Quan, vice president and associate director for broadcast research at Magna Global, a media negotiation company. "I don't think NBC expected the numbers to be this disappointing."

But just what did NBC expect?

Burnett told a reporter in early September that tracking data placed Stewart's show as the top new fall series. That information, he said in a later conversation, had been supplied to him by the network.

"I never saw the tracking," he said. "But the actual business analysis did not mirror the hyperbole" of what NBC projected. "In a business sense," he continued, "7 million prime-time Martha viewers are very valuable to us. Martha's transaction base with viewers is very high. While we'd be even more delighted with twice the numbers, this is very valuable."