We have said this before and we’ll say it again: we are big fans of Martha Stewart here at Circle, and that’s because she’s the OG influencer and all-round celebrity homemaker who makes even the hardest home tasks seem like a walk in the park. So, with that in mind, you can understand our excitement when we saw that Netflix had just dropped a new documentary that charts her iconic life.
Simply titled Martha, the documentary by RJ Cutler is a two-hour dive into the life of the world’s most beloved and controversial everyday-living guru. It starts off with her early beginnings in the 1970s and gradually moves on to when she became America’s first-ever self-made woman billionaire once her company, Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, went public in 1999. It then goes on to one of the most controversial periods of her life, when she was imprisoned for five months in 2004 for lying about a stock sale.
The documentary then moves on to the present, and how Martha’s downfall actually served as a springboard for her to come back harder than ever. In fact, while that stint in prison may have stopped many-a-celebrity’s career in its tracks—especially considering the picture-perfect persona she had crafted for the camera—Martha came back bigger than ever, proving she was far stronger than many gave her credit for.
The documentary is an intimate and animated look at everything related to the Queen of the Home, yet while it does feature the 83-year-old Martha Stewart herself, it hasn’t stopped her from commenting negatively about it, either. On the day the documentary came out (October, 30), she told The New York Times that the filmmaker didn’t make use of enough material from her archive even though he had ‘full access’. She also said that she absolutely despised the last few scenes, where they made her look like “a lonely old lady walking hunched over in the garden”.