THEY’RE ‘BUDS’
Unlikely joint partners Martha & Snoop team up for more ‘Potluck’
It’s the question you still have to ask: Martha Stewart and Snoop Dogg? Seriously? For real, says SallyAnn Salsano, one of the executive producers of “Martha & Snoop’s Potluck Dinner Party,” which launches its second season Monday at 10 p.m. on VH1. “I think it’s game recognizing game,” says Salsano, whose 495 Productions has created a string of hits that includes “Jersey Shore.” “These are two people who spent their entire lives working hard to be successful,” she adds, “and there’s a great empathy between them.” A sense of humor, too. Early in the second season of “Potluck Dinner Party,” Martha and Snoop reimagine the famous Demi Moore and Patrick Swayze pottery scene from the movie “Ghost.” Instead of shaping pottery, Stewart is applying chocolate frosting to a cake on a revolving carousel. She declares the carousel is a great invention. She also murmurs that brown is her favorite color, as Snoop slowly slides behind her to help.
It’s as surreal and amusing as you might expect, and it capsulizes nicely how this odd couple has turned pop-celebrity personas and long records of business and brand success into a hit duet.
Their relationship began in 2008 when Snoop helped whip up mashed potatoes on Martha’s TV show. Six years later, on Reddit’s “Ask Me Anything” series, Stewart said she wished she were better friends with Snoop. They reunited for a Justin Bieber roast, a T-Mobile ad and ABC’s revival of “The $100,000 Pyramid” before their current dinner date. Stewart, 76, has built an empire on cooking, decorating and generally making your life a little more elegant.
The fact that she did jail time in an insider trading scandal didn’t make her fans any less pleased with her intel on canapés and centerpieces. Snoop, 45, is a world-class rapper who has sold close to 40 million albums since his 1993 debut “Doggystyle.” Once labeled a gangsta rapper, he’s covered a range of subjects. He also did jail time for drug offenses, which hasn’t stopped him from enjoying marijuana as much as Stewart enjoys color-coordinated guest towels. They wouldn’t necessarily be paired up at Match.com. But here they’ve parlayed a shared interest in food and pop culture into a relaxed, chatty get-together with famous friends like Terrence Howard, Bella Thorne and 50 Cent. “It’s a party,” says executive producer Kim Miller Olko. One reason it works, suggests executive producer Ted Chung from Snoop’s Merry Jane Productions, is that Stewart and Snoop are actual friends who appreciate each other’s skill set and consider the other’s comfort level with material that sometimes gets a little edgy.
“I don’t think they’ve turned down any of our ideas yet,” says Salsano. “But when we bring something to Snoop, he’ll always ask if Martha is OK with it, and the same if we bring it to Martha. Very often they’ll tell us they already talked about it.”
Chung says: “We have lots of texts and threads from them — at 1 a.m., at 6 a.m. We work around the clock. We don’t sleep. You should see us at the end of a shoot.”
In the larger picture, Chung says this unlikely pairing, even on a show built on food and jokes, sends a valuable broader message about people from different places not only getting along, but having fun doing it.
“You see this show bringing people together,” he says. And breaking barriers. “Since the show started,” Salsano says, “Snoop Dogg walks into Target and gets surrounded by grandmothers. Martha gets cheered at rap concerts.”
In a business obsessed with “demographics” — are you reaching the “right” audience? — Salsano says Martha and Snoop have caused the model to explode.
“Their audiences have crosspollinated,” she explains. “This demo stuff is overrated.”