And she’s the only one surprised, reports Lisa:

But NBC insists that “The Apprentice: Martha Stewart” was not canceled and that the plan from the get-go was to produce just one round starring the queen of domesticity. In fact the NBC rep was very aggressive about that yesterday. 

This would seem to fly in the face of Stewart’s quote to Fortune in which she said that when she was offered a starring role in “The Apprentice,” “I thought I was replacing The Donald,” and that it was only shortly before she “got home” from her five months in the pen that she learned Trump’s version of the NBC reality show would stay on the air.

“The plan from the very beginning was always to produce only one cycle of ‘The Apprentice: Martha Stewart,’ ” the network rep said. “We look forward to the remaining five episodes and Martha’s choice for her apprentice during the December 21 finale,” the rep said, reading a prepared statement in a shameless attempt to turn a response to a serious journalistic inquiry into a free plug for the finale in this newspaper. Wait a minute — it worked. Hate when that happens.

I’m a little surprised, too, because I thought execs would have created a more exciting show. Martha is who she is. She needs to be framed properly to be popular. Kinda like me.