Stream It Or Skip It: ‘The Great American Tag Sale With Martha Stewart’ On ABC, A Document Of The Lifestyle Guru’s Elaborate Garage Sale For Charity

In April, Martha Stewart had a tag sale at her Katonah, NY farm, putting up for sale thousands of items large and small that she’s collected over the decades. Much of it was used either at her Hamptons estate that she recently sold, or her organization’s former office in New York City. Believe it or not, though, much of it was near and dear to her heart. But not only did she think it was time to clear the clutter in various storage buildings on her farm, but she wanted to raise money for the Martha Stewart Center For Living at Mount Sinai Hospital. The sale was filmed for the special The Great American Tag Sale With Martha Stewart.

THE GREAT AMERICAN TAG SALE WITH MARTHA STEWART: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: Scenes of Martha Stewart’s farm in Katonah, NY and all the stuff stored there. “I’m getting ready to have a very large tag sale,” she tells the camera.

The Gist: The Great American Tag Sale filmed the monthlong setup for the sale, as well as the two-day sale itself. With the help from veteran auctioneers, estate sale experts, appraisers and event planners, those thousands of items were unboxed, priced, tagged and moved to the tented location where the sale was to take place.

During the sale, celebrities like Blake Lively and The View hosts Joy Behar and Sunny Hostin show up. Kris Jenner is seen via FaceTime; she sent a representative to buy for her, with her goal to snap up an extensive set of Jadite dishes. But many of the people who bought tickets to the sale are just Stewart fans who came from all over the country to buy something she picked out or used. People buy things that range from a figurine all the way up to fixtures and furniture worth thousands of dollars.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? The Great American Tag Sale feels a bit like an extension of the Discovery+ series Martha Gets Down And Dirty, which took place at the same farm and showed the extent of how Stewart gets personally involved in the goings on there.

Our Take: We’ve come to appreciate Martha Stewart over the years for just how weird she can be sometimes. You read that right: The doyenne of domesticity has had a grand time in the years since she went to federal prison for lying about a stock sale in 2004, and she’s not afraid to let her odd side show as she goes through all of the items she wants to sell. She not only concedes that she may be a borderline hoarder, but she takes time out to call out to the peacocks she has on her farm in an effort to “talk” to them.

The tag sale ended up raising over $800,000 for her charity, which we had to look up because the amount wasn’t given on the screener we watched, so in the end the sale helped a good cause. But it was also an exercise in pretty blatant consumerism, especially among a privileged class that could not only afford the tickets to the sale, but buy the goods she had for sale and transport them back to their homes.

The crowd that came to Stewart’s farm was overwhelmingly white, and overwhelmingly upper middle-class and above. You’re not seeing a mom and dad in sweats trolling the sale for a non-broken Crock Pot, like you might at your neighborhood garage sale. It’s because of this that we were disappointed that the majority of the special concentrated on the sale and not the setup.

Sure, we get the idea that watching people inventory all of the thousands of items Stewart put up for sale isn’t exactly riveting TV. But there could have been some Antiques Roadshow-style appraisals from the very funny trio of Frank Kaminski, Jim Klinko and Vincent Manzo, and more scenes of surprising discoveries that Martha might not even remember she had.

Instead, we got scene after scene of fans buying things. We enjoyed the fact that the overall-clad Stewart mixed and mingled with the crowd, encouraging people to buy and taking selfies with fans. But we wish we could have gotten a whole lot less of that and a whole lot more of a view of some of the best items in the sale.

Sex and Skin: None.

Parting Shot: Stewart drives away from the sale site in her Polaris ATV golf cart, waving at the camera.

Sleeper Star: As we said, the trio of Frank Kaminski, Jim Klinko and Vincent Manzo should get a show together. They were funny both apart and bouncing off each other.

Most Pilot-y Line: So many people said something like “I bought things I didn’t know I needed.” You know, we’ve been in that state of mind, and kind of hate ourselves when we see the credit card statement at the end of the month.

Our Call: STREAM IT, if only because some of the items in The Great American Tag Sale With Martha Stewart are interesting to look at, and Stewart herself is remarkably down to earth. But the show itself isn’t exactly an exercise in inflation-era belt-tightening.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.