Martha Stewart Living Television

The numbers.

Facts and patterns drawn from 1,216 documented episodes, April 01, 1998 to September 30, 1999. Numbers compiled from the archive; partial entries noted.

The run

1,216

episodes documented

856 confirmed by primary source

11

seasons, 1993 – 2004

S1–S9 on CBS / Syndicated; S10–S11 on Hallmark

1999

the peak year

169 episodes that year alone

First broadcast

Fish Dumplings; Vegetable Tagine; Charoset Seder Plate

April 01, 1998

Series finale

Presidential Luncheon; Teaching Children Table Manners

September 30, 1999

"Nov was the busiest month."

113 episodes aired in Nov — more than any other month. October second with 109. June and August nearly silent: 12 episodes each.

What she covered

Episode count by primary topic (seed episodes only)

cooking
421
baking
220
crafts
207
gardening
201
home
188
travel
113
holiday
77
pets
53
entertaining
41
flowers
23

Out of the studio

113

Field trip episodes. Martha left the studio to visit Jamaica, Bar Harbor Maine, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show, Vera Wang's studio, Bobbi Brown's makeup room, the Bronx Zoo, Balthazar, Aquavit, the Four Seasons, and hundreds of farms, workshops, and restaurants across the country and the world.

Each one was an education. The field trip was her most durable format.

Recurring segments

18

Cookie of the Week

documented episodes featuring the segment

8

Good Things

title episodes (the segment appeared far more often)

202

Garden-to-table

episodes with garden-as-pantry as the underlying theme

Her mother

"Big Martha" Kostyra appeared in three of the ten confirmed Hallmark-era episodes.

Martha Kostyra — Martha's mother, known as "Big Martha" — joined her daughter on screen for episodes about family recipes, birthday celebrations, and Eastern European cooking traditions. Of the ten Hallmark-era titles we can confirm, three feature her by name. She was the show's most documented recurring guest.

Season by season

S1

30 episodes

30 confirmed

S2

30 episodes

30 confirmed

S3

30 episodes

30 confirmed

S4

30 episodes

30 confirmed

S5

182 episodes

179 confirmed

S6

167 episodes

166 confirmed

S7

164 episodes

163 confirmed

S8

151 episodes

150 confirmed

S9

68 episodes

61 confirmed

S10

10 episodes

9 confirmed

S11

8 episodes

8 confirmed

Underlying themes

433everyday cooking
332home improvement
202garden-to-table
87culinary fundamentals
76pets
55holiday entertaining
41entertaining
1everyday baking

The vocabulary

The archive carries 1,681 unique tags across all documented MSL episodes. The most frequent, excluding year tags:

crafts555gardening268dessert231baking228field trip143entertaining109cookies104holiday94flowers80cake78christmas53decorating52chocolate45pie45berries44

Photography

1,115 of 1,216

documented MSL episodes now carry a photograph from marthastewart.tv. The photographs come from Martha's own streaming archive and are the images her team selected. The remaining 101 carry a plain tile — honest about what we don't have.

Images sourced from marthastewart.tv (Vimeo OTT), courtesy of Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia. This is a non-commercial research archive.

About this data

Episode records were compiled from TheTVDB, IMDb, TV Guide, Yidio, Wikipedia, and marthastewart.tv. Hallmark-era episodes (Seasons 10–11, 2002–2004) were recovered from the marthastewart.tv streaming archive in May 2026 — previously declared unretrievable by public databases. Topics, themes, and tags were assigned during data generation; the taxonomy is imperfect but consistent. Numbers on this page are drawn live from the archive database and update as the archive grows.

What we don't know yet →