For fans worldwide, the news of Black Sabbath frontman Ozzy Osbourne has been met with mourning for a musical icon. However, for many, the 76-year-old’s career also marked the legacy of an early 2000s reality television pioneer.
Decades after his rise to heavy metal prominence, the self-proclaimed Prince of Darkness, alongside his wife Sharon and their two teenage children, Kelly and Jack, starred in MTV’s The Osbournes. This groundbreaking series pioneered what its producers termed a “reality sitcom”.
Predating the Kardashians and the Real Housewives, Ozzy captivated audiences as he navigated everyday life, such as grappling with the TV remote in his Beverly Hills mansion.
The blend of mundane routine and extraordinary fame proved successful, leading to an Emmy Award and a four-season run from 2002 to 2005.
“The Osbournes inaugurated a wave of celebrity-driven reality TV,” Andy Dehnart, president of the Television Critics Association and editor of Reality Blurred, remarked to the BBC.
According to executive producer Greg Johnston, the show’s creators embarked on filming without a clear vision of the final product.
At the time of The Osbournes’ premiere, reality TV predominantly featured competition-based formats with everyday individuals, such as Survivor, The Bachelor, and The Real World.
While a celebrity-centric show could have emphasized the excesses of a rock star’s lifestyle, The Osbournes instead depicted a family engaged in ordinary activities, such as loading the dishwasher or exercising at home.
“It was conceived as something of an experiment,” Mr. Johnston told the BBC.
Many of the producers who contributed to The Osbournes had backgrounds in sitcoms, which they leveraged to portray this real-life family.
“The intro credit sequence evokes the feel of The Partridge Family or Father Knows Best,” noted Dr. Brandy Monk-Payton, assistant communication and media professor and television researcher at Fordham University.
Ozzy embodied the role of the “lovable buffoon”, according to Dr. Monk-Payton, with segment producer Henriette Mantel describing the middle-aged rocker as “Ward Cleaver from Leave It To Beaver on acid”.
The approximately 20-minute episodes captured lighthearted moments, such as Sharon’s act of throwing a baked ham over the fence in retaliation against a noisy neighbor, their rock-and-roll lifestyle exemplified by Ozzy’s tour rehearsals, and family frustrations, such as Ozzy’s repeated struggles with tripping over the dog bowl.
“It was a normal family, yet wild and crazy,” Ms. Mantel told the BBC, emphasizing that “they truly loved each other,” which resonated on screen.
In this sitcom-like setting, Kelly and Jack played the roles of squabbling siblings, executive producer Jeff Stilson told the BBC, while Sharon served as “the mom trying to hold it all together”.
In many ways, a typical dad, Ms. Mantel recalled that “Ozzy just wanted to… lay on the sofa and watch the History Channel”.
According to Dr. Danielle Lindemann, professor of sociology at Lehigh University and author of True Story: What Reality TV Says About Us, the tension between the familiar and the unfamiliar is precisely what attracts reality TV viewers.
“We want to see the outrageous, the zany, but at the same time, we don’t want it to be so removed from our lives that we can’t relate at all,” she explained.
MTV reported that The Osbournes achieved its highest ratings during its run. Billboard cited the network’s data, noting that the second season’s premiere in late 2002 drew 6.6 million viewers, an 84% increase from the first season.
The success of this novel format paved the way for shows like Newlyweds: Nick and Jessica, which debuted in 2003, Keeping Up With the Kardashians in 2007, and Bravo’s various Real Housewives franchises.
In today’s television landscape, “reality” is often presented with a knowing wink.
However, on the set of The Osbournes, the concept of capturing everyday life was so novel that producers had yet to determine the extent to which they could shape the narrative. They assert that the stories they captured were genuine, at least initially, and typically based on around three weeks of footage per episode, compared to the current norm of four days for a single episode.
According to Mr. Johnston and Mr. Stilson, filming occurred continuously each day until the family went to sleep. “They forgot the cameras were there,” Mr. Stilson stated.
TV critic Mr. Dehnart cautioned: “There are still layers of production and construction that we’re not seeing.”
That hands-off approach evolved as viewership grew. For instance, Kelly and Jack later revealed that a plotline involving a dog therapist was created specifically for the show.
According to editor and producer Charles Kramer, working on The Osbournes entailed developing a new reality TV genre in real-time.
He told the BBC that tropes such as editing raw footage to create a narrative and the use of the “Frankenquote” – combining lines from different scenes – were refined on The Osbournes.
“Now everybody uses those terms,” he said.
Mr. Kramer applied his experience from The Osbournes to another celebrity-driven program, The Girls Next Door, while other creators, like Mr. Stilson, expressed a desire to distance themselves from the evolving reality-TV landscape.
As Dr. Lindemann points out, it has become commonplace for fans to access celebrities’ personal lives, often through social media.
However, in the early 2000s, the inner workings of celebrity life portrayed in The Osbournes, such as appearances on the Tonight Show and Sharon’s management of Ozzy’s music business, were far more mysterious to the average person.
“Being able to see someone who’s a superstar… in this somewhat relatable context was new and refreshing, because it’s not like people were following Ozzy on Twitter,” Dr. Lindemann said.
That level of access had its consequences. Ozzy told Metal Hammer in 2022 that he felt like a “laboratory rat” after three years of being followed by cameras, although he maintained that he was “not ashamed” of the program.
“It got to the point where I was falling apart emotionally,” he told the magazine, “because you can’t… relax”.
Spending their teenage years in the spotlight also presented challenges for Jack and Kelly, who shared their experiences with drug use in books published in 2009 and 2017.
“I don’t think either one of us was really prepared for” the fame, Kelly told ABC’s Good Morning America in 2017.
“That’s a difficult situation to put teenagers in. But they handled it as well as anybody could,” Mr. Stilson said.
After 52 episodes across four seasons, The Osbournes concluded in 2005. Mr. Stilson wonders if they should have ended production after the first season, noting that it became a “darker show” after Sharon’s cancer diagnosis and Ozzy’s relapse with drugs and alcohol.
For Mr. Kramer, part of the appeal for audiences was Ozzy’s “regular folk” working-class background and, for Americans, a fascination with his distinctive Birmingham accent.
Ozzy appeared to embrace the hard-scrabble British persona that resonated with US audiences.
“You know, when they show it in England, there are no bleeps (over the swears). It isn’t as much fun,” he told Rolling Stone in 2002.
Mr. Stilson disagrees that the show’s edge was its key to success.
“The success of the show was the sweetness of the family and the ridiculous dynamic,” he said.
“It was about a functional family – that cursed a lot.”
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