The Osbournes was the first reality TV show of it’s kind – and Ozzy was its unwilling, unwitting main attraction
To millions of Black Sabbath fans, Ozzy Osbourne was the Prince of Darkness. An anarchic, devilish God of heavy metal who ate bat heads, snorted ants and urinated on cenotaphs. But to me, he was the first – and ultimate – reality TV star.
The Osbournes was the first series of its kind when it premiered on MTV in 2002. A series following the lives of Ozzy and his family – wife Sharon and their teenage children Jack and Kelly, not to mention their zoo of cats and dogs – this was like nothing we’d ever seen before. There was no careful PR curation or image management, no sit-down interviews – it was pure unadulterated chaos.
While there were glimpses of their rock’n’roll celebrity lifestyle, The Osbournes was more keen to show Ozzy as we’d never seen him before. He was in his mid-fifties and in semi-retired dad mode, complaining about everything from his neighbours to the TV remote to his dog’s incessant defecation all over his house. He was rarely seen wearing anything but tracksuit bottoms (black, of course), his long hair pulled back into a ponytail. For those of us who were first introduced to Ozzy via his reality show, it was hard to imagine him as anything close to the Prince of Darkness.
But it was exactly this incongruence between his rockstar legacy and his semi-retirement that made for such fantastic television. One particular scene sums up the dichotomy perfectly: while assessing the pyrotechnics for an upcoming concert, Ozzy flips out at wife Sharon (also his manager) for having bubbles blow across the stage along with the flamethrowers and fireworks. “Bubbles?!” he shouts. “I’m f***ing Ozzy Osbourne, the Prince of Darkness. Evil? What’s evil about f***ing bubbles?!”
Ozzy’s outbursts were frequent and invariably hilarious. In one memorable episode, Sharon fits the Osbourne mansion with a new entertainment system – one that is beyond Ozzy’s comprehension. “This is f***ing space-age s**t,” he mumbles as he bashes the controller. “I’m a very simple man,” he complains, unwittingly summing up exactly what made The Osbournes so watchable.
For Ozzy – a normal Brummy bloke whose music took him to the Hollywood Hills – was not made for the celebrity life he found himself living; or, as he calls it, a “nightmare in Beverly Hills”. In one Christmas episode, he is astounded by how many presents they are giving, recalling that all he would get as a child was “a smelly old sock with a few nuts in, a couple of pennies, an apple and an orange.”
In another, he is flabbergasted to learn that Sharon wants to hire a dog psychologist in an effort to stop their pooches from soiling their expensive carpets. “You don’t need to hire a dog therapist, you just need to wake up at 7am and open the f***ing door,” he tells his wife (only for Sharon to hire the dog therapist – who Ozzy calls a “fruit loop” – anyway). Despite his constant reminders to his family that he is a “rock star” (and therefore shouldn’t have to pick up the dog dirt), Ozzy was always just as perplexed by his life as us watching.
The Osbournes was the start of a new era of reality television. The love Ozzy and his family received just for being their outrageous, sweary, chaotic selves has been irresistible to celebrities ever since. Even two decades after their series came to an end, the trend is still going strong – Sylvester Stallone, Stacey Solomon, Alec Baldwin and even Katie Price’s 18-year-old daughter Princess currently have their own fly-on-the-wall reality series.
There’s an argument to be made that without The Osbournes, there would be no Kardashian empire. When Keeping Up with the Kardashians started in 2007, it was a carbon copy of Ozzy’s show, though there was a key difference: Kim, Kris and co were desperate for fame, and their attention-seeking stints (naked photoshoots, adopting a baby chimpanzee) lacked the authenticity of The Osbournes. As a result, Keeping Up with the Kardashians became glossier and more sanitised as its subjects climbed the greasy pole of celebrity. The current iteration – The Kardashians on Disney+ – and its many, many pretenders are world’s away Ozzy’s bona fide incredulity.
Ozzy Osbourne won’t be remembered as an inspiration to the Kardashians, nor will his legacy be minimised to the sweary bumbling caricature we fell in love with on The Osbournes. But it would be foolish to deny just how influential the reality show was – without it, my generation (at least those of us who aren’t too keen on “War Pigs”) would have no cultural touchstone for the genius of Ozzy Osbourne. Whether he is memorialised as the dove-eating godfather of heavy metal or as the man who turned something as inane as being unable to shut a drawer full of chocolate into TV magic is immaterial. Both have cemented Ozzy Osbourne’s place as a giant of British culture.
