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The Osbournes aired from March 2002 until March 2005 on MTV.
The surprise sensation of the summer of 2002 was this witty look into the family life of one of rock music's legendary bad boys. It was too good to be true. Could it really be that Ozzy Osbourne, the " Prince of Darkness" himself, the foulmouthed, heavily tatooed lead singer of '70s heavy-metal band Black Sabbath, known for such onstage antics as biting the heads off bats and offstage behavior like urinating on the Alamo , had become an addled dad with a wife and kids, trying to maintain order in a riotous household but unable to even operate his new wall-sized TV( " It's stuck on The Weather Channel")? While amiable Ozzy mumbled and cursed ( every other word in this show seemed to be bleeped), sensible Sharon , his wife of 20 years, managed his life and career. Living with them were party girl Kelly, with her spiked technicolor hair, and chubby Jack, who wore black-rimmed glasses and a camouflage helmet( Eldest daughter Aimee, whom Sharon called " the normal one," refused to participate in the show)They all ratted around their huge Beverly Hills mansion , where Sharon's menagerie of dogs and cats defecated on their carpets and Ozzy tried to figure out that (bleep!)remote.
A Review from The New York Times
TELEVISION REVIEW; That Lovable Sitcom Dad Who Likes to Nibble Bats
By CARYN JAMES
Published: March 5, 2002
As the cameras follow a family moving into its new California house, we see the boxes all neatly labeled: ''Pots & Pans,'' ''Linens,'' ''Devil Heads.'' Then we meet the characters in this newest reality series. There's Sharon, the practical mom; Jack, the bored teenage son; Kelly, the pink-haired teenage daughter; and Dad, a heavy-metal icon who screams ''rock 'n' roll!'' at the camera.
The whole family uses a word that has to be bleeped all the time; it's sweet when families develop that affectionate shorthand language. As it trails Ozzy Osbourne and his family through their everyday lives, MTV's new series ''The Osbournes'' plays like a hilarious real-life version of ''The Addams Family,'' tongue in cheek and mischievously funny.
The trick is in its mocking spirit, evident in the theme song -- a crooning 50's-style cover of the Osbourne song ''Crazy Train'' -- and the satiric sitcom credits that introduce the family, including ''Ozzy Osbourne as the Dad.'' The idea of Ozzy Osbourne playing Ozzie Nelson may be an easy joke, but it's a good one.
We see Dad at home waiting for the cable guy. Of course, this home has a huge red-carpeted staircase out of ''Gone With the Wind'' and crucifixes as an essential part of the décor. (''We'll never be able to sell it,'' Sharon says of the house.) Soon Dad is having trouble with the remote for the new television and like any middle-aged father has to call his teenage son to help. The screen is enormous and the remote the size of a small laptop computer, but still, fathers and sons everywhere can identify.
Dad walks around the house in black track pants and a T-shirt that shows the tattoos up his arms, but eventually he has to go to work. That means appearing on the ''Tonight'' show. Jay Leno drops by the make-up room while Mr. Osbourne is having his eyeliner put on and asks for an autographed CD for his nephew.
Mr. Osbourne projects an endearing personality, playing the loving, beleaguered father to the hilt. At a large dinner at a restaurant, when his daughter complains that he can never hear her, he says: ''You have not been standing in front of 30 billion decibels for 35 years. Just write me a note.'' When the children are about to go out for the night, he says in a pleading tone: ''Don't drink, don't take drugs, please. And if you have sex, wear a condom.'' And he means it when he tells the family, ''I love you all, I love you more than life itself, but you're all'' -- expletive -- ''mad.'' Aging rock stars don't fade away; they just learn to make fun of their age.
Their father's career leaves the children with unusual concerns the series has yet to address. How do teenagers rebel when Dad is famous for eating bats? The Osbourne children haven't strayed far from the parental turf yet; they haven't done the obvious thing of turning Republican and joining a country club. Like any teenagers, they fight and threaten to tell on each other, though in a child-of-Hollywood way. When Kelly swats Jack, he says, ''That's on camera, Kelly, I'm showing that to Mom!''
This clever series can be plumbed for meaning: it reveals the way hard rock has been absorbed into the mainstream, and it skewers the self-importance of most reality television. But most of all it's a timely joke that works. The Osbournes have arrived, and they have a devil's head over their front door to prove it.
An Article from Time Magazine
Ozzy, Not Ozzie
Monday, Mar. 04, 2002
By JAMES PONIEWOZIK
If the war on terrorism has not obviated the culture wars, expect some family-values commentator to cry that MTV's The Osbournes (Tuesdays, starting March 5, 10:30 p.m. E.T.) is leading America further down the road to hell already well trod by its protagonist: Ozzy Osbourne, the shock rocker who once bit the heads off bats onstage. On this winning "situation reality" show, shot inside the Osbourne family's L.A. mansion, teenage sis calls her brother a "f___ing loser." Mom tells the kids to "shut the f___ up and go to bed." And Dad, exasperated, says, "I love you more than life itself. But you're all f___ing mad."
These are not things a nice family says. Except that the Osbournes prove to be nice indeed, even if, as we see them moving into their new home, the movers carry boxes labeled DEVIL HEADS. The kids have money and a rock-star dad, but they seem grounded. The family spars constantly--and colorfully--but it spars together.
Real life has provided a great cast (even if the British accents are so thick, it can be like watching a Ken Loach movie). With dear, lumbering Dad (seemingly boggled by his own wealth); strong-willed wife Sharon (Ozzy's manager); independent-minded daughter Kelly (with dyed-pink hair, like a girl-power answer to Ozzy's black-clad metal-god persona); and chip-off-the-old-block Jack (a likable oddball with a thing for bayonets), the Osbournes are like the Soprano family without the guns. TV thrives on facile distinctions between "functional" and "dysfunctional," but this family is delightfully functional in its own bleeping-mad way.
--By James Poniewozik
An Article from The New York Times
No Rest for Family Values on Black Sabbath
By ALESSANDRA STANLEY
Published: April 2, 2002
Dad was snoring on the couch through most of his family's antics on last week's episode of ''The Osbournes.'' But when he discovered that his wife planned to liven up his next concert by filling the stage with bubbles, Ozzy Osbourne, 53, snapped to attention.
''Bubbles?!'' he hollered indignantly. ''Sharon, I'm the Prince of [bleep] Darkness!''
''The Osbournes'' is a half-hour show on MTV that follows this once-satanic heavy metal star and his equally foulmouthed wife-manager and two teenagers through daily life in their Baroque-Gothic Beverly Hills mansion. (Crystal, chintz and souvenir death's-heads.)
An odd amalgam of ''Ozzie and Harriet,'' ''The Beverly Hillbillies'' and ''This Is Spinal Tap,'' the show is the biggest hit in MTV's 24-year history, and its popularity is spreading. Last week the show, on Tuesday nights, drew six million viewers. HBO's ''Sex and the City'' gets about 6.4 million an episode; ''Six Feet Under,'' also on HBO, gets about 5.4 million.
''The Osbournes'' has introduced a new television genre: the docu-sitcom.
Television producers are already exploring knockoffs. The day after the premiere, said Scott Sassa, president of NBC's West Coast division, ''I went into a development meeting and said, 'Guys, what do we do here?' '' Describing ''The Osbournes'' as ''different in a significant and meaningful way,'' Mr. Sassa said he instructed his staff to seek similarly different material for NBC.
Despite the tattoos and endless bleeping, the show stands out mostly because the British rockers are so subversively middle class. An MTV camera crew lived in their house for almost four months last fall and showcased Mr. Osbourne, the former lead singer of Black Sabbath, famous for biting off the heads of bats onstage, as a typical suburban dad. He cannot master the remote control, his unruly household or his wife's menagerie of incontinent cats and dogs.
When his wife tells him that she has hired a pet therapist, Mr. Osbourne looks appalled. ''No, darling, you don't need a therapist,'' he moans. ''You need to get up at 7 a.m. and open the [bleep] door.'' The camera cuts to the Beverly Hills pet therapist, blond and brisk, striding up the drive.
At times Mr. Osbourne's slurred speech and trembling hands make him seem more like a dotty pensioner than a Prince of Darkness, but even heavy-metal purists do not seem to mind the de-demonization of their idol.
''It's so hilarious to watch Ozzy take three minutes to put a liner in his trash can,'' Brian Fair, 26, a member of a thrash metal group, ''Shadows Fall,'' explained. ''I don't think his fans have any illusions,'' said Doc Coyle, lead guitarist of the metal band God Forbid. ''Everybody knows his brain is fried.''
In a sense, ''The Osbournes'' completes an arc that began in 1973 when PBS broadcast ''An American Family,'' a 12-hour documentary series on the Louds, an attractive, well-to-do-family in Santa Barbara, Calif., whose disintegration on camera became a national psychodrama.
More than a quarter-century later the Osbournes are documented over 12 episodes for laughs.
Scholars find even that significant. ''The show is funny, but it is also emblematic of this age of celebrity,'' said Anna McCarthy, a professor of media studies at New York University.
''Before we turned ordinary, real people into protagonists,'' she added. ''Now we take celebrities and turn them into ordinary characters for comic effect.''
MTV executives are confident that they have found the next big thing. ''I do think that the wall between the public and celebrities is going to crumble even further,'' said Brian Graden, MTV's president for programming. ''TV already demands as much access as possible, but we take it to a whole new level. Julia Roberts is going to have to take a film crew on her next vacation to be a viable cultural figure.''
The fourth episode, in which the Osbournes wage war on their Beverly Hills neighbors for playing their ''middle-aged music'' too loud, beat out all competition -- cable and network -- for one of the age groups most coveted by advertisers, viewers 12 to 34. The Osbournes have appeared on ''Today'' and the ''Tonight'' show.
Critics who have mostly sneered at other MTV hits like ''Jackass,'' praise ''The Osbournes.'' In The New York Times, Caryn James wrote that the show ''plays like a hilarious real-life version of 'The Addams Family,' tongue in cheek and mischievously funny.''
The MTV generation sees the family as the new Simpsons.
''They genuinely seem to love each other, and they call each other the worst names in the world,'' said Craig Marks, editor of Blender, a rock music magazine. ''Ozzy's life is so fictional. It's as if someone created this loony heavy metal star from England who settles in Beverly Hills. But it's real life, so it can't succumb to the icky conventions of sitcoms.''
''The Osbournes'' derives from MTV's ''Real World,'' a reality show for young people. Mostly, it stems from the Osbournes' star turn last year on ''Cribs,'' a weekly MTV tour of rock stars' homes.
At a dinner afterward at the Ivy restaurant in Santa Monica, Mrs. Osbourne and the children regaled the MTV team with family stories and invited the cameras back to record their move to a new house.
''We said: This is it, this is the show,'' Lois Curren, a producer of the show, recalled.
Mrs. Osbourne, who is also preparing her husband's seventh annual summer tour, Ozzfest 2002, wields considerable control. The family members were allowed to screen rough cuts and remove anything they found embarrassing. ''She told us we could film her in her pajamas without makeup,'' Ms. Curren said.
Mrs. Osbourne, who watched the show on television for the first time last week, said she did not wince.
''I got past being embarrassed after the first two months of filming,'' she said in a telephone interview in which she did not utter the word [bleep] even once.
Both Jack, 16, who sports heavy black-rim glasses and often a camouflage helmet, and Kelly, 17, whose hair is dyed pink, are un-self-conscious. They argue, scuffle, talk back to the nanny. (Jack says, ''[bleep] off and get a real job,'' when she tries to coax him to clean his room.) Kelly discusses the hygienic consequences of wearing thong underwear with her mum. She complains angrily to her dad when mum makes a gynecologist appointment for her.
And Mr. Osbourne plays Dad to the hilt. As the children prepare to go clubbing, he tells them to be home by 2:30 a.m. ''Don't drink, don't do drugs and if you have sex, wear a condom.''
Their eldest daughter, Aimée, 18, who lives on her own, declined to participate.
''Aimée is normal, like the daughter in 'Absolutely Fabulous,' '' Mrs. Osbourne sighed, referring to the British sitcom that pits two aging party girls against a disapproving bluestocking daughter. ''She is so embarrassed by us.''
The success of the show has not translated into a spike in sales for Mr. Osbourne's latest album. ''We can't give it away,'' Mrs. Osbourne said.
Referring to music available on the Internet, she added, ''Why buy it when you can get it for free?'' Mostly the show has given Mr. Osbourne a new and incongruous second career as a television star.
Many Americans know Mr. Osbourne, a working-class lad from Birmingham, England, as a sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll bane of Tipper Gore, who campaigned against explicit lyrics. He was banned from San Antonio in 1981 for urinating on the Alamo.
In 1986 the parents of a boy who killed himself while listening to his song ''Suicide Solution,'' held him responsible in a suit that went to Los Angeles Superior Court (which threw out the case on the grounds of First Amendment rights).
But music fans discovered his addled, avuncular side long ago.
The band Led Zeppelin was the father of heavy metal, Mr. Marks explained. ''Ozzy is more like the loony uncle.''
An Article from Time Magazine
OZZY Knows Best
Sunday, Apr. 07, 2002
By JAMES PONIEWOZIK
The neighbors are complaining about loud music in the middle of the night. This is exactly what you would expect on a reality show about the Beverly Hills, Calif., home life of British metal god Ozzy Osbourne, wife Sharon and teenage kids Kelly and Jack — except that the noisy ones are in the manse next door, blaring "The Girl from Ipanema", and the Osbournes don't like it one bit. But this is not the best part of the episode. The family retaliates by blasting death metal on the stereo (while Ozzy snores away, his slumber safeguarded by decades of standing in front of deafening amp stacks) and throwing a ham over the hedges. But this is not the best part of the episode either. No, the best part is when a bleary-eyed Sharon and Jack reminisce about their favorite old neighbor: Pat Boone. "He was just the best person ever to live next door to," Sharon says wistfully. "He was such a lovely man."
The Osbournes, MTV's hit "reality sitcom," would be good enough if it only gave you what you would expect — flying meat, crucifixes on the doors and enough bleeped-out cursing to give Pat Robertson the vapors. And it does. What makes it brilliant is its surprising mundanity, the Pat Boone-y-ness of it all: Ozzy puzzling over the satellite-TV remote, flipping out over Kelly's new tattoo (while sporting a few acres of skin art himself) and struggling to fit liners in the trash bin.
Rock-'n'-roll fantasy meets take-out-the-trash reality: this is why "The Osbournes" (Tuesdays, 10:30 p.m. E.T.) is the most successful new series in MTV history. Its ratings are up 57% since its premiere; 5 million people tuned in to last Tuesday's broadcast alone: Total Request Live-watching teens captivated by the dotty uncle they recognize from his annual Ozzfest tour, old-timer Black Sabbath fans tickled to find the band's singer still breathing. More important, it has done the near impossible: got viewers excited, in a Didja-see-it-last-night? way, about a show that for all practical purposes belongs to TV's most moribund genre, the sitcom.
Ask TV executives — even MTV's — about "The Osbournes," and they will tell you the channel got lucky in a way you can't duplicate. (MTV will have to drop the show after one season unless the family consents to another; the network may stretch the 10 planned episodes to 13.) This is true in the literal sense: when Ozzy was created, he bit the head off the mold. NBC Entertainment president Jeff Zucker says, "I don't think you can just do The Lees now, as in Tommy."
But in a broader sense, what MTV has done right is a case study in what TV often does wrong. The Osbournes is the oldest thing on TV since the test pattern: a nuclear family that eats meals together, shares its problems (even if every third word is bleeped) and survives wacky scenarios. The family dogs are peeing on the carpets, so they call in a pet therapist! Jack goes to a hippie sleep-away camp and hates it! (Kelly: "They make you feed a tree before you feed yourself." Ozzy: "How the f___ do you feed a tree? Put out a ham sandwich?") But the show violates the conventions that make so many sitcoms so, well, conventional. The pace is leisurely, not forced, and the humor derives less from "jokes" than from characters who do something more envelope pushing than cursing: surprise you.
Take the kids. (Or take two of them; the eldest daughter Aimee moved out of the house for the four-months-plus taping.) In sitcomland, Kelly would be a boy-crazy princess; Jack, an Alex P. Keaton rebel-in-reverse. In reality, they're smart, self-deprecating teens living an abnormal childhood normally; they're rich, their dad is the Prince of Darkness, and they're fine with it, thanks. Kelly talks more frankly about matters gynecological than any other teen on TV, in a jocular, locker-room way, but hardly mentions boys. Jack is starting his own record label. How square can you get?
Take away the Gulfstream jets, and it's something you see in real life but rarely on TV: a baby boomer's family that is neither traditional nor "Dharma & Greg" wacky. The unspoken context of "The Osbournes"' humor is that Ozzy's problems were not always of the how-do-you-work-the-remote variety; he has talked voluminously about his substance-abusing past. Now he tells his kids to say no to drugs and use a condom if they have sex. Whether that is hypocrisy or wisdom, even boomers whose wild life was limited to coughing through half a doobie in a parking lot can relate to Ozzy's situation in a way that re-examines that most political phrase, "family values." "It's not about how stiff or strict you present yourself," says MTV Entertainment president Brian Graden. "It's about how honest and loving you are."
"The Osbournes" is also a symptom of the evolution of celebrity. Save for an Olympian few, the Julias and Denzels, stars need to allow ever greater access, to dance for us a little, to stay in our good graces. (Make no mistake, "The Osbournes" is expert p.r.: Sharon, who is Ozzy's manager, allowed MTV's cameras back after the family did the network's house-tour show "Cribs.") From the surprise Fox hit "Celebrity Boxing" to the star editions of NBC's entrails buffet "Fear Factor", reality TV has become a kind of on-air pension plan for slightly used celebrities. And if any network knows how simultaneously to debase and elevate celebs, it's MTV, the home of "Celebrity Deathmatch." "The Osbournes" says Ozzy is just like you because he has to take out the garbage and deal with dog pee; it says he is not like you because when he does this, it's funny (and it's on TV).
Yet Ozzy, with his bangers-and-mash accent, is such a bloke that you even empathize when he gripes about riding in a stretch limo ("f___ing pimpmobile!"). Like The Beverly Hillbillies, The Osbournes is about working-class people who happen to be rich. During the row with the neighbors, the "rich boys" next door make fun of the family's Martha-meets-Marilyn Manson decor. "[Ozzy] worked for those f___ing doors with the crosses on them," Kelly fumes. "So f___ them!" Leave it to the English to remind America that class exists. The Osbournes also violates some taboos by laughing about things sitcoms aren't supposed to. On the show--taped last fall, at the height of America's post-9/11 anxiety--Ozzy yells at a rascally pet, "He's a terrorist! He's f___ing part of bin Laden's gang!" Earlier this year, Drew Carey complained that ABC forced him to tone down an episode that made fun of airport-security workers.
"The Osbournes," of course, is a hit on cable, with its more relaxed standards and smaller audiences. Still, MTV has reshaped mainstream TV before. The Real World wouldn't have made it on CBS, but it spawned Survivor. NBC may not have aired Jackass, but it eventually gave us Fear Factor. "I'm sure the networks will find a lame, copycat way to do it wrong," says producer Judd Apatow (Undeclared). "Most television is constructed by committee. And a show like this doesn't have a committee, so it can't be watered down." The networks are already considering new twists on reality series. ABC is positioning "The Hamptons," a two-part documentary by Barbara Kopple about the Long Island resort towns, to air in June, as "the first reality mini-series." Whether "The Osbournes" affects how sitcoms tell funny stories is another matter. Perhaps you can't make up something that original. But it would be nice to see somebody try.
With Reporting by Leslie Berestein/Los Angeles and Benjamin Nugent/New York
An Article from Time Magazine
Back in the Land of Ozz
Wednesday, Nov. 20, 2002
By JAMES PONIEWOZIK
There is famous, and there is famous. When the Osbournes opened their home to MTV's cameras last year, they were niche-rock-star famous. Today they are dinner-with-the-President famous, interview-with-Barbara-Walters famous, hit-video-on-Total Request Live famous. So things have changed on the second season of The Osbournes (Tuesdays, 10:30 p.m. E.T., beginning Nov. 26). Yes, everyone still swears a lot. Ozzy still can't figure out the TV remote. And the dogs still soil the carpet, although if they're smart, their agent has now negotiated a per-poop bonus in their contracts. But the series is no longer about the Osbournes, heavy-metal Munsters. It's about the Osbournes, stars of The Osbournes.
If watching the family become mainstream media stars is not as weirdly fun as the first season was, it's intriguing in its own way. MTV has never been shy about embracing the postmodern paradoxes of reality programming — The Real World no longer even pretends to be about real life, and millions of viewers couldn't care less — so The Osbournes takes the fame issue straight on. We catch up with Ozzy and wife manager Sharon primping for the White House Correspondents' Dinner, the annual fete during which the two nerdiest groups of celebrities — politicians and journalists — surround themselves with actual stars to bask in the reflected cool. As George W. Bush gives Ozzy a shout-out from the podium and the Prince of Darkness leads the room in applause for himself, you hope that someone had the good sense to take away William Bennett's steak knife.
Meanwhile, youngest daughter Kelly, glammed up and ready to debut her cover of Madonna's Papa Don't Preach at the MTV Movie Awards, is starting a music career. Like any good metal princess turned teen idol, Kelly is showily ambivalent, wearing a jacket that says pop stars kiss my big fat a__, even though on her trendy, punk-lite new single, Shut Up, she sounds like Belinda Carlisle for the 21st century. Jack, the mellower Osbourne sib, thinks sis is getting too big for her crucifixes. During an argument, Kelly tells him, "I hope someone beats you up." He snaps back, "I hope your album fails." Sharon is aghast — at Jack. In this family, you can tell somebody to blank themselves in the blank with a blankety-blank, but jinx their Soundscan numbers, and you've crossed a line.
In the middle of the family's boom time intrudes the realest thing imaginable: in Episode 2, Sharon is diagnosed with colon cancer. Ozzy, on tour and distraught, begins self-medicating with prescription drugs and drinking heavily. "She's the whole world to me," he tells the camera in a rare serious moment, and it's no exaggeration: you can't imagine the gentle, trembly rocker managing five seconds without her support. Sharon invites MTV into her chemo sessions and her sickroom with typical brazenness ("Sharon, how's your a__hole today?" she jokes. "Oh, much better, thank you!"). Yet you get a stronger feeling than last season that the cameras are on a leash. Nobody cries — though the family mentioned plenty of tearful moments in their recent sit-down with Walters — and MTV stresses that the cancer episode "does not signify a change in tone for the season."
Well, cancer does signify a change in tone for a family's life. (The illness also arises when family friend Robert Marcato, 18, moves in with the Osbournes after his mother dies of cancer.) If future episodes ignore it, they may just seem cynically feel-good. And if anyone can work cancer into a reality sitcom, it is The Osbournes, which won us over by flouting convention, and MTV, which wins viewers over by telling them that they and their icons are part of the same extended family. MTV is full of series whose premise is giving ordinary people the key to Celebville (Tough Enough, Making the Band). The Osbournes has managed to do the same thing with people who lived there to begin with. It took a somewhat famous clan and made them wildly famous, and yet to us, they're the nice folks down the street who hit the lottery. After all, we knew them back when they were merely somebodies.
A Review from Variety
Published on November 25, 2002
The Osbournes
(Unscripted series; -- MTV, Tues. Nov. 26, 10:30 p.m.)
By PHIL GALLO
Filmed in various locations by MTV. Executive producers, R. Greg Johnston, Jeff Stilson, Sharon Osbourne; co-executive producer, Jonathan "JT" Taylor; producers, Ann Meek, Francis Gasparini, Sue Kolinsky, Matt Swanson; directors, Donald Bull, Brendon Carter, CB Harding, Sarah Pillsbury, Todd Stevens;
Starring: Ozzy Osbourne, Sharon Osbourne, Kelly Osbourne, Jack Osbourne.
The most talked-about show of the year returns a little less nutty, a lot more self-conscious and, after episode two explores matriarch Sharon Osbourne's colon cancer, with a much more serious tone. Round one was a pure nuthouse affair, a tour of the unbelievable. As the second season starts, they seem so, well, normal. Or at least overly familiar.
Ozzy doesn't seem so much like he's on tour as he is on a business trip. Sharon and Ozzy travel to D.C. for a dinner at which President Bush acknowledges the presence of the former Black Sabbath singer. The more he stays away from Sharon, the more he longs to be home. Apparently, he's been drinking so much that rehab is in order.
Siblings Jack and Kelly bicker like every other set of teens in America. Jack loves videogames, Natalie Portman and his drums; Kelly is becoming a pop star, most likely a flash in the pan. They fight a lot, cuss like their parents and lead a generally spoiled life in two glorious Southern California homes.
Episodes one and two don't set up this family the way its premiere eps did in the spring. Going in, the audience knows they're in for something different with the characters assembled yet there's no clear point of view or even bizarre antics. The closest "The Osbournes" come is in showing Ozzy throwing knives at a block of wood.
Sadly uneventful, show is well-edited fly-on-the-wall cinema that neither tugs at the heart nor generates laughter. It appears that the show will start to go down a depressing road in which the antics of the kids and Ozzy will be overwhelmed by the ordeal Sharon is about to undergo.
An Article from The New York Times
TELEVISION REVIEW; The Osbournes Return, Still Weird and Warm
By CARYN JAMES
Published: November 26, 2002
Every season on ''The Osbournes'' -- this is only the second season, but it's amazing how fast the family has become an institution -- Ozzy says something immensely touching. Last time he walked into a birthday party, looked around for his teenage children, and asked, ''Where are the babies?''
This time he talks about how hard it is to tour while his wife, Sharon, is home getting chemotherapy. ''My heart was breaking every night onstage,'' he says. ''I put on a brave face, but when you've got a broken heart 'cause somebody you love got sick, you can't pretend not to have a broken heart.'' More lucid than he has seemed in recent interviews, he says this without a bit of mawkish sentiment, though onstage he does look a wreck: sweaty, hair drenched, eyes ringed with liner.
As entertaining as ever, the Osbournes remain a wacky, harmlessly outrageous variation on Everyfamily, as full of warmth as they are of weirdness: Ozzy the trembling Goth-looking Dad, Sharon the expletive-spouting Mum, Kelly the pudgy would-be singer and Jack the unformed belligerent adolescent. With the Osbournes, the freeing values of sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll have come home to roost, and a very cozy home it is (despite the bleeped language and the mess on the floor from the unhousebroken dogs).
The new season of their comic reality show (tonight on MTV), cleverly picks up where we left them: the Osbournes have become famous. There is no pretense that things haven't changed since the series become a phenomenon just eight months ago. Now cameras trail them to the White House Correspondents' Dinner, where they are the guests of the Fox News Channel and are acknowledged in the president's speech (nothing could be more mainstream). We see Kelly perform at the MTV Movie Awards, one more perk of her fame, but also see her and Jack as normal siblings, fighting and insulting each other. On a private plane Kelly the pop star falls asleep sucking her thumb.
On the same plane, at the end of tonight's episode, Sharon says, ''Everything is really great for us, and I think something is going to come and knock us on the chin.'' As so many headlines and interviews have since revealed, her premonition came true when she was diagnosed with colon cancer. She is still going through chemotherapy, and while her illness is addressed in the second episode, it is not exploited.
We see her looking tired and talking from her bed at home. We follow her to the hospital for a chemo treatment, but the camera cuts away before there is any true invasion of privacy. This smartly edited series has always kept viewers at a comfortable distance; the family's outsized personalities make the show seem more intimate than it is.
It's Sharon's illness that makes the Osbournes seem most normal, going through what any other family might. When she learns that her mother is ill, Kelly says, ''It was like someone stabbed me in the chest.'' Jack says, ''You think something like that can never come into your family, but when it does it's just a really big shock.'' All the banal expressions of disbelief have a leveling effect, making the family more sympathetic and easier to identify with than ever.
And even as they fend off tragedy, they remain extremely funny. On the road Ozzy starts drinking in response to Sharon's illness. A 12 step sponsor named Robert is sent to try to keep him sober with yoga, spirituality and poetry. (Hasn't he ever watched the show?) As Robert dramatically reads a poem out loud, Ozzy looks blank, then expresses his confusion with perfect comic timing. As always, the funniest lines are unprintable.
MTV's ''Osbournes'' is only one facet of the large-scale reality show that the family is living out. Lately the whole media landscape has become one big ''Osbournes'' series. And though they are everywhere, the public is not tired of them yet.
There was Ozzy weeping during a ''20/20'' interview -- possibly the only time Barbara Walters has urged someone to stop crying on camera. The program was so popular that ABC repeated it two weeks later. There was Sharon telling Ms. Walters and later Jay Leno that she copped a feel and felt and complimented Camilla Parker Bowles's breasts as a way of breaking the ice at a meeting with the royals, and making that sound spirited and innocent. Sharon has signed to do her own talk show.
As the reality show of their lives goes on, we worry about Sharon, though probably not as much as we worry about Ozzy, who was barely intelligible on the Leno show. Sharon is the fighter who says -- and it's a sign of how fully ''The Osbournes'' has entered our culture that we're reassured by hearing this -- ''I'm not ready to croak yet.''
An Article from The New York Times
TELEVISION REVIEW; In Show's Return, Dogs Train the Osbournes
By VIRGINIA HEFFERNAN
Published: January 27, 2004
The premiere of the third season of ''The Osbournes,'' tonight on MTV, begins with Sharon Osbourne's inventory of her family's dogs: ''Ben, Mag, Bully, Peggy Sue, Colin, Martini, Pip, Chips, Crazy Baby, and the two news.'' Prompted by her husband, Ozzy, Ms. Osbourne recalls a 13th. ''Oh, I missed out Ruby, you're right.''
As devoted viewers of the documentary series know, ''The Osbournes'' is more than a portrait of a madcap family whose status comes from the father's exorbitant talent for rock music and ghoulish self-display. It's also a show about lap dogs, how they're cute and how they try to have sex with one another and with cats. Also how they defecate.
Someone at MTV must think these dog sequences are surpassingly rich, as one camera on the ''Osbournes'' team appears always to be trained on them. Tonight's episode features close-ups of each kennel member, as well as a sequence in which one of them befouls an office. Hee hee.
As for the humans in the house, rumors that they had become boring appear to have been exaggerated. In the first episode, which was shot last fall, Ms. Osbourne, who had cancer last season (and in life), chirps along, musing amusingly about where or whether to steer the rudderless ''Sharon Osbourne Show,'' which is still on daily. With his not-quite-kicked habits and his inexplicably good-natured contempt, Mr. Osbourne paces through fame and fatherhood. Their son, Jack, who seems to have conquered in rehab the demon OxyContin, works out with a trainer while drinking a pink shake. And their daughter, Kelly, the vain one who, unlike the others, seems out of reach of tragedy, still preens and back-talks.
So the series still features scenes (like the excruciating haul-by-hand of a 980-pound golden Buddha to the back of the Osbournes' property) and epigrams (Ozzy to workmen: ''I wanted it out the front'') that highlight the mighty absurdity of family and professional life. These bodies -- Ozzy's, which contains an incalculable alchemy of drugs and bat DNA, and Sharon's, which was made by surgeons -- can simulate the human condition, which is still wrenching and funny at once.
So how will the season go? It seems safe to say the family will not go straight. One of the weirdest parts of a reality sitcom like this one is that no producer can stop plot leaks; the family makes news even while it's shooting a reality show. Fans, therefore, know at least some of what's in the cards, and it's not good. In December, the real December on the calendar, Mr. Osbourne broke his neck in an all-terrain vehicle accident in Britain. That will surely merit time on the show, which has not whitewashed the experiences of the careworn family so far.
At least there are the dogs, however silly and playful. Right? Maybe not. An MTV publicist demurred when asked for the names of the ''two news'' Sharon Osbourne cited in the season premiere. ''Right now,'' he said, ''they could be dead. Dogs drop like flies around that house. So they have 13. Tomorrow they might have like four.''
THE OSBOURNES
MTV, tonight at 10:30, Eastern and Pacific times; 9:30, Central time
Lois Curren, executive vice president, series and movie development, and executive producer for MTV; R. Greg Johnston, executive producer for MTV; Rod Aissa, executive producer and vice president, talent development for MTV.
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