Martha Stewart: Behind Bars
CBS
9 p.m., 8 p.m. Central
Saturday,
September 24, 2005

The print ads for the CBS movie Martha Stewart: Behind Bars promised, "Jailhouse tart baked with apples of shame!" Wowee zowee! It's been years since there's been a good women-in-prison flick, the kind where the sadistic lesbian warden and her ugly lesbian guards oversee an erotic hellfire of voluptuous, halter-topped lesbian prisoners whipping out knives and breasts in the act of seedy lesbian violence and sex, with the innocent prisoner, who comes to realize she's a lesbian, winning out in the end. Throw in the Doyenne of Domesticity — does this mean there will be handmade brooches on the halter tops?

The movie being on CBS instead of Cinemax should have been the first clue that the closest Martha Stewart: Behind Bars would get to Caged Heat was when Stewart, upon entering the federal pen, was told by a female guard to "bend over." No nudity involved, and the movie cut away to the next scene before we could determine if the guard took sadistic lesbian pleasure out of the cavity-search experience. Plus, no halter tops — Stewart's fellow prisoners wore sweat suits.

Then again, how hot could it get? Stewart served her time in a minimum-security prison, not Folsom. She lied about a stock sale. She didn't kill azaleas just to watch them die. Still, Martha Stewart: Behind Bars was disappointly uncampy, even on its own terms.

Cybill Shepherd reprises her starring role as Stewart, following her turn in the 2003 CBS movie "Martha Inc.: The Story of Martha Stewart." In portraying Stewart's rise, Shepherd was sufficiently tight-faced but also got to the opportunity to, finally, chew some TV scenery instead of being left starving as Bruce Willis or Christine Baranski ate it first.

The first movie was so gloriously awful that, for about 150 straight nights, David Letterman showed the scene with Shepherd-as-Stewart pulling up in a car beside the mistress of Stewart's husband and shouting, "Hey slut! Does your mother know you're a whore?" Hollywood hadn't seen a veteran actress descend this quickly and enthuiastically into camp since Bette Davis decided she'd spend the 1960s going batty in entertaining howlers like Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? and Hush...Hush, Sweet Charlotte.

And for Sunday night's movie, we're promised "jailhouse tart!" Who wouldn't watch that?

Sadly, there were no tarts. The movie was as delicious as the slop Shepherd-as-Stewart pushed aside in her first prison meal. The only apples of shame were the stolen fruit, supplied by a fellow prisoner, that Stewart got busted for squirreling away in her prison locker. The most sadistic anyone got was her fellow prisoners chanting "Martha was a bad girl!" after the apple bust. Man, I'll never believe an ad in In Touch Weekly again.

Shoot, the movie didn't even get to prison until one hour in. The first half is Stewart selling her stock, Stewart sitting in depositions and Stewart going to trial, events that progress with the aid of that silent-movie mainstay, the montage over a flipping calendar. The movie is Martha Stewart: Behind Bars. Not Martha Stewart: Strategizing With Her Lawyers. Not Martha Stewart: Perp Walking. Not Martha Stewart: Calling Her Broker. Get to prison, already! Even if it turns out to be boring, it's what we tuned in to see.

Then again, the problem with Shepherd-as-Stewart is that by this point in her career, Stewart is presumed to be as tight-faced and stiff-legged as the women in the ads for feminine itching products, which were bountiful during the CBS broadcast. Shepherd can pull off the look, but it doesn't exactly make for scenery-chewing camp.

It's clear that these quickie Stewart movies are based in fact only in the sense that there's a woman named Martha Stewart who got famous and went to jail. So why didn't the writers take a few liberties? Some sort of showdown with a fellow prisoner? Leader of a hunger strike to get fresher flowers in the cafeteria? A meltdown when her team's origami cranes lose the Christmas decorating contest to what appears to be a manger somebody sat on?

Obviously, Stewart herself has reached a point where she isn't jazzy enough to carry her own TV movie. So maybe what producers could do is from here on out is construct some sort of parallel Martha universe that put her in mind-bogglingly campy situations, like how James Bond ended up on a space station in Moonraker. Maybe she could arrange flowers by day, solve crimes by night. Or she could lead a rock band. Or maybe she could take a job as a prison warden. A sadistic, lesbian prison warden.

— Bob Cook (bobc@flakmag.com)