The Osbournes
Osbournes are smashing success: But their 'madness' is tough to duplicate
Calgary Herald
Monday, June 2, 2003
Page: B14
Section: Arts & Style
Byline: Nick Lewis
Source: Calgary Herald
Spotlight
The Osbournes airs Tuesdays on Ch. 3 at 10 p.m. Ozzy
performs Wednesday at
the Saddledome. The show is sold out.
He spent years and years building up that "Madman"
monicker.
It took biting the head off a dove, attempting to kill
his wife, flirting continuously with alcoholism and taking acid every day for two
years. It took urinating on the Alamo and snorting a line of marching ants. It took
public lashings from the religious right, and lawsuits claiming he drove teens
to suicide.
Then Ozzy Osbourne, the Prince of Darkness, killed a
30-year-old illusion by
getting a reality TV show last July.
Suddenly, here was a new side to the legendary
heavy-metal singer. Here was a 54-year-old unholy terror who
was being scolded by his wife and was telling his kids
not to do drugs, and to wear condoms and call home if
they were going to stay out late.
The show has been a smashing success.
Since it debuted on MTV on March 5, 2002, The
Osbournes has been the highest-rated show in the channel's
history, attracting up to eight million viewers per
episode. CTV in Canada ran uncensored episodes in
September 2002, which led to its popularity in Canada.
An all-new season is set to air on MTV on June 10,
while season two wraps up on CTV on June 24.
"It's proven to be a seminal show for MTV," says
network president Van Toffler. "Part of the charm is that it was
so unexpected, and I believe the reason it works is
the juxtaposition of the freakiest, weirdest human on the
planet in the most traditional of situations."
Like The Sopranos, The Osbournes relies on the
contrast of a man with a gonzo lifestyle dealing with everyday
family problems.
"Here, at 53, copiously tattooed, shuffling and
slightly palsied, the former Black Sabbath frontman grapples
with (and is forever flummoxed by) the mundane details
of his domestic existence," wrote Paul Farhi of The
Washington Post.
And soon, wife Sharon, daughter Kelly and son Jack
were as much a household name as papa Osbourne.
A one-year-long TV career has given Ozzy more
merchandising deals than 32 years of being a musician. The
Osbournes have signed 55 licences for more than 300
products -- including lunchboxes and a voice-activated
plush bear that screams "I'm the prince of (expletive)
darkness!" -- hoping for a return of $200 million US.
But long before The Osbournes, there was the infamous
MTV Cribs episode. That's where it all began.
MTV Cribs, a sort of lifestyles of the culturally
famous, gave viewers a peek inside the houses of artists such
as Robbie Williams, Rob Zombie, Busta Rhymes and Boy
George. While episodes involving Tommy Lee's
bedroom sex swing and Outkast's living room strip club
proved popular, no show got greater buzz than the one
that visited the home of the Osbournes.
After the episode aired, Jack told Sharon that he
thought an entire series on the life of the family might make
for great television. Sharon pitched Jack's idea to
MTV, which paid a total of $200,000 for 10 half-hour
episodes. Shot over six months in the Osbourne's
13,000 square foot, $20-million Beverly Hills mansion, the
show would follow the daily exploits of an unusual
rock-and-roll family.
The first episode of The Osbournes had to be bleeped
59 times for obscenities, the word du jour being one
that clearly started with the letter 'f'. The episode
was broadcast 15 times in its first week on MTV, during spring
break.
One reviewer called it "a Satanic update of The
Beverly Hillbillies," while another suggested the show be
called "The Munsters, 90210."
Viewers were surprised to see Ozzy as a decrepit
middle-aged man, hunched over and shuffling around like
Mr. Burns, physically and mentally burned out and
struggling over the most menial of tasks. This mumbling,
stumbling, wide-eyed-with-confusion Ozzy was a stark
contrast to the agile frontman of Black Sabbath.
"He's not fried. He's just wasted," Sharon told
Entertainment Weekly last March. "People wonder why they can't
understand him. Well, you'd be hard to understand too
if you drank two vats of coffee, two vats of wine, and
took 25 Vicodin a day. I can't stop him. The only
thing I can do is make sure he's not on the street and make
sure he sleeps in a way that he won't choke to death
on his own vomit."
But Ozzy's incoherence only helped to make The
Osbournes "a home run on first swing," says Robert
Thompson, director of Syracuse University's Center for
the Study of Popular Television. It also helped change
the idea of what reality TV was all about.
"Reality TV had threatened to take away the role of
'star of TV series' from celebrities and put it right in the lap
of 'regular people,' " Thompson says. "Contestants on
Survivor would become celebrities by virtue of the fact
that they were on these shows. What The Osbournes did
was demonstrate that the reality TV phenomenon
could work for people who were already famous as well
as it could for regular people."
The Osbournes was a hit right away, becoming the
highest rated show on basic cable. There was a moral
backlash to the show, but it had little to do with
Ozzy's past debauchery.
"I think it's an indictment to the soullessness of
modern man that we get a kick out of witnessing a magnificent
creature reduced to a blithering hopeless idiot,"
rocker Ted Nugent said to the New York Post.
"All of you (media) need to stop with this Ozzy
Osbourne," said former TV dad Bill Cosby on Access Hollywood.
"This is a sad, sad family. It is a sad case. The
children are sad and the parents are sad. And this is not
entertainment."
Competing networks didn't think so.
A slew of fly-on-the-wall copycats emerged, the first
being the Anna Nicole Show on the E! network. Following
that, a number of celebrities offered themselves as
reality TV subjects, including Motley Crue's Tommy Lee,
Courtney Love, Sean "P. Diddy" Combs, Liza Minnelli
and husband David Gest, Cybill Shepherd, George
Hamilton and Van Halen's David Lee Roth.
"What The Osbournes managed to do was demonstrate that
the hippest place in show business is now your
own reality autobiography," says Thompson.
"It used to be when you were a has-been star you could
go on Love Boat or Murder She Wrote. Now, of course,
you try and get your own reality sitcom."
More than anything, that's been The Osbournes' impact
-- the forming of a new sub-genre of reality shows
where celebrities allow us to see them as themselves.
You've probably noticed a few of them. Star Dates
premiered on the E! network in December, combining the
fly-on-the-wall element with the where-are-they-now
nostalgia factor. Butch Patrick from The Munsters, Gary
Coleman from Diff'rent Strokes, Dustin Diamond from
Saved By the Bell and Kim Fields from The Facts of Life
go looking for love in a Blind Date-type setup.
The WB's The Surreal Life put together a cast of
down-and-out stars such as MC Hammer, Emmanuel Lewis
and Corey Feldman to wallow in their own self-pity.
And ABC's I'm A Celebrity, Get Me Out Of Here! put
has-beens such as Melissa Rivers, Tyson Beckford and
Bruce Jenner in the jungle to fend for themselves.
None have been as popular as The Osbournes.
"The trouble with a home run is that you get a lot of
strikeouts after," says Thompson.
"The timing of The Osbournes was great because now
rock 'n' roll is at least half a century old. It's no longer
the province of simply young people. Rock 'n' roll
isn't just something young people listen to, it's what their
grandparents listen to on oldies radio. So suddenly,
Ozzy's not the one making records where parents say turn
that down, he's the one saying turn that down."
What The Osbournes did is serve as a reminder that
sometimes even the most twisted fiction can't compete
with reality. Ozzy, Sharon, Jack and Kelly are
caricatures as much as characters, Thompson says, which
accounts for their appeal.
"Sharon's the stabilizing force, Ozzy's this guy from
another planet, and these kids, who are so strange and
different from anything we've seen on a sitcom before,
are funny in their own uniqueness," he says.
"The Osbourne family was something that no fictional
genre -- television, film, stage, poetry -- had come up
with. No scriptwriter could come up with the drama
they have."
