By the time Martha Stewart rose to fame, family life in the United States looked very different than it had during her childhood. American mothers had entered the workforce en masse, and when Stewart’s first book was published, in 1982, many women were no longer instructing their daughters on the finer points of homemaking fundamentals like cooking meals from scratch or hosting holiday gatherings. Stewart’s meticulous guides to domestic life ended up filling a maternal vacuum for many of her fans, and she inspired both devotion and envy. Oprah Winfrey, no stranger to hard work herself, once summed up the ire that many people felt about Stewart: “Who has the time for all of this? For every woman who makes a complicated gingerbread house, a million don’t even have the time to bake a cookie.”

At a moment when American women were already feeling the exhaustion of the second shift, Stewart seemed to suggest that they toil overtime to beautify their second work environment too. But despite being most famous as a homemaker, an occupation usually associated with mothers, Stewart would later appear ambivalent about motherhood itself. Before her daughter was born, when Stewart was 24, “I thought it was a natural thing,” she says in Martha, a new Netflix documentary about her life and career. “It turns out it’s not at all natural to be a mother.”

Early in the documentary, an off-camera speaker—Stewart is the only on-camera interviewee—refers to her as “the original influencer.” The label emphasizes how she shaped domestic life and purchasing trends decades before the advent of Instagram or TikTok; as one friend says, Stewart “was the first woman that saw the marketability of her personal life.” Archival images of a young Stewart exude the charming, homespun domesticity that many social-media creators now emulate. We see Stewart stooped low in her gardens, then feeding chickens in her “palais du poulet”—the French name she gave her coop (“palace of the chicken”). That visual would be right at home on the vision boards of modern influencers who broadcast their nostalgic visions of Americana to millions of followers.

But Stewart’s words, whether spoken directly to the camera or read from private letters, tell a story that diverges from tidy fantasies. Part of why Martha raises such interesting questions about motherhood, family life, and domestic labor is Stewart’s apparent doubts about the value of all three. Throughout the documentary, she seems to be confronting her own conflicting beliefs, but clearly, business—not the art of homemaking—has been the essential pursuit of Stewart’s life. And her single-minded focus on expanding her empire is what ultimately attracted the most criticism as she transformed into a gargantuan brand.

In 1987, the same year that Stewart published Weddings, a glossy guide about how to host the perfect matrimonial celebration, she and her husband separated after he had an affair with a younger woman. While Stewart promoted a book about celebrating love, she wrestled with her family’s private dysfunction—and when rumors of the affair became public, Stewart worried about the professional implications of her husband appearing absent from her carefully curated life. At one point in the film, Stewart advises young wives on how to react to their husband’s philandering: “Look at him, [say] ‘He’s a piece of shit,’ and get out of it. Get out of that marriage,” she says defiantly, cautioning today’s women not to stay, like she did, and try to work things out. (The two divorced a few years later, in 1990.)

Only when the documentary’s director, R. J. Cutler, asks about an affair that she had earlier in the marriage does Stewart concede her own actions. “It was just nothing,” she says, before decrying the messiness of divorce. “I would never have broken up a marriage for it.” It’s one thing to cheat in private, in other words, but she frowns at the public spectacle of dissolving a family unit. The moment draws attention to how tightly Stewart has attempted to control her image—and underscores how much she appears to resent the ways her accomplishments (and her misdeeds) have been judged in relation to her gender. In 1999, Stewart, then the CEO of Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, became the first female self-made billionaire in the United States. The following year, Joan Didion wrote in a New Yorker essay that the “dreams and the fears into which Martha Stewart taps are not of ‘feminine’ domesticity but of female power, of the woman who sits down at the table with the men and, still in her apron, walks away with the chips.”

Nearly 25 years later, Martha makes the case that Stewart was subject to different rules than her male counterparts because she disturbed conventional views of women in the corporate world. “She was ruthless,” one commentator says. “In the business world, that’s a great trait for a man. But, you know, for a woman—you know, she was a bitch.” That may be an interesting place to begin a look back at a controversial mogul, but the documentary is light on specifics about Stewart’s perceived professional shortcomings, which have included criticism that she underpaid her staff while earning millions, berated them, and sold their work as her own. Instead, we get the vague sense that some people thought she was harsh and that others found her to be an exacting perfectionist. But unlike an earlier CNN docuseries on Stewart, Martha shies away from interrogating the details of such workplace accusations in favor of rehashing how multiple powerful men underestimated or outright disliked her.

[Read: Martha Stewart must know something we don’t]

The back half of the film brings the same gender-based analysis to Stewart’s infamous 2004 trial, which began with the FBI—led by a young, ambitious James Comey—implicating Stewart in a larger insider-trading scandal. When the agency failed to indict Stewart for illegal trading, it pursued a case against her for lying to the authorities during the investigation. In the end, Stewart served five months in prison after being found guilty of charges including obstruction of justice and conspiracy. Martha presents the case as one more example of the vitriol that Stewart had long endured. To her critics, Stewart’s case punctured the veneer of her propriety; even though her prison sentence had nothing to do with her corporation, it suggested an untoward explanation for her lifestyle company’s success, one that made Stewart’s relentless drive even more unpalatable. “I’m strict and I’m demanding and I’m all those good things that make a successful person,” Stewart says in an archival clip from around the time she was sentenced.

A more nuanced view does emerge in the documentary, which later addresses how Stewart changed while serving her sentence. Her time in a West Virginia prison prompted a serious reconsideration of her enterprise—and what kinds of homes it reflected. Stewart encountered incarcerated women who’d faced much harsher realities but also wanted to turn their varied talents into viable business ventures. Hearing the other women’s stories and looking over their business plans when they sought her advice made the experience bearable for Stewart—and partially recalibrated her approach to her own work. The homecoming speech she delivered to her staff shortly after being released focused heavily on shifting the why of their work. “I sense in the American public there is a growing need to preserve human connections,” Stewart said then, adding that she had come to understand “the need to honor many, many kinds of families.”

Nearly a decade after Stewart left prison wearing a poncho crocheted by a fellow inmate, the rise of girlboss feminism popularized a style of brash, demanding leadership that Stewart embodied before her conviction. Girlboss feminism has since fallen out of favor in the corporate world, but today’s lifestyle influencers, even those who espouse traditional values, are more emboldened to openly discuss the profit-making motive of their work—especially if they look the part of the doting maternal figure. Where Stewart often succeeded in branding herself as a businesswoman before a mother, many of the most popular homemaking-content creators seem to grasp that their children are the most important emblems of the hyper-feminine fantasy they’re putting on display. As my colleague Sophie Gilbert recently wrote in an essay about a new Hulu reality series following TikTok-famous Mormon women, “the Secret Lives stars are notable for how intricately their brands are enmeshed with fertility—not the mundane reality of day-to-day motherhood but the symbolic power of sexual eligibility and maternal authority.”

These women’s popularity—and, in some cases, their families’ economic viability—is inextricably tied to how they perform sacrificial motherhood, a role that Stewart never appeared interested in. But even though the business of domesticity has shifted in the years since Stewart’s IPO, her earlier successes unquestionably primed audiences for the advent of homemaking influencers whose approach to their public image differs radically from her own. Stewart laid a foundation for an entire genre of creators who generate income by giving followers a glimpse into their kitchen—not just with her recipes but with her sheer dedication to building a brand and her unwillingness to render her labor invisible. For all the controversies Stewart has weathered, she’s always seemed to project authority because she knows what she’s doing—and she’s always behaved as though everyone would be better off heeding the boss’s advice.

The Scottish rock star will follow in the footsteps of Kylie Minogue, Dolly Parton and Shania Twain.

When Donald Trump seemed poised to win the presidential election in 2016, Trevor Noah, then the host of The Daily Show, began the program’s live night-of special on a somber note. “It feels like the end of the world,” he said to a silent audience. “I’m not going to lie. I don’t know if you’ve come to the right place for jokes tonight, because this is the first time throughout this entire race where I’m officially shitting my pants.”

On Tuesday night, Noah’s predecessor, Jon Stewart, returned to anchor the same live presidential election-night special for the first time since 2012, and Stewart’s mood was noticeably lighter than Noah’s. Stewart didn’t make any apocalyptic declarations; instead, he seemed desperate to make his studio audience laugh—“We are obviously digging through the results to find some that you like!”—without reminding them too much of the election’s likely outcome, which had begun to clarify when the hour began. Stewart may have built his reputation as an acerbic comedic truth-teller, but on Tuesday night, he seemed subdued, more interested in soothing his viewers than in delivering biting assessments of the returns.

The overall approach felt oddly inert, perhaps a sign of how confusing the world of political comedy has become. That’s in part because comedians came to play a substantial role in Trump’s third presidential campaign. Trump and his running mate, J. D. Vance, went on a tour of podcasts hosted by comics who appeal to young male voters, including Tim Dillon, Theo Von, and Joe Rogan. Trump’s team also invited the comic (and another podcaster) Tony Hinchcliffe to take the stage at a rally last month at Madison Square Garden, where he made disparaging remarks about Puerto Ricans that received the kind of backlash many pundits called this year’s “October surprise.”

Forget attaining celebrity endorsements from pop stars and Hollywood’s A-list talent, in other words. Both Trump and his opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris, seemed to recognize the need for unconventional forms of outreach, but the Trump campaign in particular eschewed traditional journalists in favor of provocative comics and hosts who would provide friendly platforms for the former president. “A survey of many hours of conversations between these comedians and Trump mostly reveals slavish affection,” observed The New York Times of Trump’s podcast appearances, “and even a certain kinship … Trump and his hosts share a disdain of news media, a reflexive paranoia about so-called cancel culture, a delight in transgression and a love of cruel insult jokes.”

[Read: Why democrats are losing the culture war]

That shift toward comedians as sources of ideological validation has left established satirists such as Stewart in an odd position. Though Stewart has enjoyed plenty of success this election year—his return as the Monday-night anchor for The Daily Show helped reverse the viewership decline that happened during Noah’s stewardship, and his contract was recently extended through 2025—he continues to face an uphill battle in maintaining his impact.

As the face of a long-running television program, Stewart is constrained by ratings concerns and runtime logistics, but he’s also committed to performing a routine that’s barely changed over the years: an opening monologue, followed by correspondent-led segments, a guest interview, and a “moment of zen.” The new cohort of podcasters may also care about audience engagement, but they’re nimbler with their content—and they’re becoming more influential as a result. Stewart’s chosen platform for his comic punditry isn’t the dominant approach for political comedy anymore. (Several of The Daily Show’s offshoots, such as Samantha Bee’s Full Frontal, Larry Wilmore’s The Nightly Show, and Jordan Klepper’s The Opposition, failed to last, and on Tuesday, The Daily Show was the only late-night show to air a live special.)

Yet Stewart has seemed reluctant to adjust his strategy—or to criticize the actions of some of his peers. Note how he responded to Hinchcliffe’s set at the Trump rally: On an episode of The Daily Show, he praised Hinchcliffe as “very funny” and defended him against the negative news coverage of his set. In some ways, Stewart did what he’s often done: take aim at the larger institution of the media rather than a fellow comic. But by sidestepping the opportunity to scrutinize the growth of the comedian-to-campaign-influencer pipeline, he avoided examining his own role as a purveyor of political humor.

Other comedians have been more willing to consider their field’s shifting responsibility. In a Substack post, the ex–Daily Show correspondent Wyatt Cenac chided his former boss for his reaction to Hinchcliffe. “For Jon, it seems like comedians should be free to say whatever they want, wherever they want,” Cenac wrote. “And he seems more willing to defend the idea that the circumstances surrounding their jokes are irrelevant as long as people laugh.” Those “circumstances”—taking stages at rallies rather than clubs, offering their podcasts as prominent campaign stops—have also caught the attention of Marc Maron, one of the most prominent podcast-hosting comedians. Maron posted a statement to his website a week before the election criticizing contemporaries he believed had become mouthpieces for misinformation and casual bigotry. “The anti-woke flank of the new fascism is being driven almost exclusively by comics, my peers,” he wrote. “Whether or not they are self-serving or true believers in the new fascism is unimportant … When comedians with podcasts have shameless, self-proclaimed white supremacists and fascists on their show to joke around like they are just entertainers or even just politicians, all it does is humanize and normalize fascism.”

[Read: What happened to Jon Stewart?]

Maron’s comments double as a demand that his fellow performers recognize the stakes of participating in this political moment. But the comedy world’s response to those stakes has run the gamut. Perhaps some of the podcasters he’s calling out want to wield actual power to sway voters—and therefore, like the powerful leaders they’re catering to, build a dedicated fan base of their own. Other comics, like the team behind Saturday Night Live’s “Weekend Update,” may see their role as entertainers meant mostly to gesture at the issues driving headlines. After this latest election cycle, the one thing that seems clear is that political comedy—the point of practicing it, the changing flavor of its influence—is growing ever muddier.

For Tuesday night’s live show, meanwhile, Stewart opted to provide mostly distraction. His punch lines were as soft as his analysis of election results, struggling to dispel the undercurrent of unease. That’s not entirely Stewart’s fault: His audience seemed tense from the start, and the show faced some unexpected developments, including announced guest Senator John Fetterman of Pennsylvania canceling at the last minute, forcing Stewart to improvise and fill the extra time. Only at the end of the hour did Stewart fully embrace his own distress at the election returns, putting his head in his hands as he delivered a closing statement. “Look,” he began, before groaning and stumbling over his words. “What we know is that we really don’t know anything … I just want to point out, just as a matter of perspective, that the lessons that our pundits take away from these results, that they will pronounce with certainty, will be wrong. And we have to remember that.”

The plainspoken commentary was a refreshing moment that cut through the preceding aimlessness—but it also revealed a truth about the comedic genre’s stalwarts, like Stewart. Americans look to voices such as his in anxious moments; it’s why SNL has booked the typically no-holds-barred stand-up Bill Burr to host its postelection show this weekend. Yet Stewart has never claimed to be anything more than a performer, even when he was deemed the “most trusted man in America” during his initial run hosting The Daily Show. As he pointed out, none of us knows anything—perhaps, least of all, the comics who are tasked much too often with making sense of the nation’s chaos.