For her 'Apprentice,' Martha's all business

Given how well-known Mark Burnett's "Apprentice" format is to most viewers, the little things were most notable about the premiere episode of Martha Stewart's incarnation.

So much was familiar:  The faux-urgent music and quick cuts, the gratuitous crane shots, the pacing and format.  Differences were small, and yet they spoke volumes.  Donald Trump's skyscrapers and baroque interior design were replaced with horses, fabric swatches and sweeping shots of open paint buckets in Martha's palette of colors.  Donald at a construction site was subbed out with Martha in the kitchen. The confines of Trump Tower were replaced by an airy, minimalist loft just down the hall from Martha's office, complete with celebratory cheese platter. The O'Jays' lust for "Money" was replaced with the Eurythmics' "Sweet Dreams."

But as Martha made very clear to her charges at the outset: domestic diva or no, this competition is still all about business.  In case you didn't get the message, she described the IPO of Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia by saying, "I became America's first female self-made billionaire." She paused for a beat, then smiled. "It felt really good."

Rather than divide the teams according to one of the silly Burnett-style mechanisms (boys vs. girls) she let them divide themselves, perhaps one of the most savvy reality-show moves in a while.  The 16 hopefuls came up with an interesting set of criteria, eventually matching the "creative" types against the "corporate" ones.

Given the task — to overhaul a classic fairy tale for Random House — you'd think the creatives would have the advantage.  And Martha was impressed when they unveiled their team name, Matchstick: "I can see that logo," she said.  She was far less impressed when the corporate types revealed their own. Primarius sounds like the sort of formless nonsense word that branding firms get paid a lot of money (by people like the ones on the corporate team) to dream up.

It wasn't nearly that clear-cut, though.  Martha laid out some pretty clear guidelines for the task: "Business lesson No. 1 for me is connecting with your audience."  In other words, creative brilliance be damned; give the people what they want.  She hammered home that theme repeatedly, and in the process made apparent that her empire is hinged on meeting the expectations of her readers and viewers.

After some initial squabbling, Primarius took the lesson to heart, pulling kids in for a focus group and discovering they had a gem in Howie, the former Wall Streeter from New Jersey, who had the children squealing with glee as he read.  There's no doubt Howie's talent at connecting with kids — and don't think Martha wasn't sending a subtle message by having the first set of "customers" being a bunch of Manhattan tots — won Primarius the challenge. (Man, that team name is even painful to type.)

Yet even after a stellar success with the focus group, Primarius project manager Dawna fretted that the creative minds on the opposing team could still win out: "We could do this great story and Matchstick could still win the task."  As it turned out, the corporate types ended up with the fun innovations that dazzled the Random House execs: the elegant design, the first-person voice and the notion of having the beanstalk grown down into the ocean.

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