From Prince of Darkness to beloved reality TV king: How Ozzy Osbourne paved the way for the Kardashians
The musician who killed the MTV video clip became the star of the first reality show based on a famous family
Perhaps it came about because it was the first. Or perhaps it was due to the judicious choice of unfiltered protagonists. The Osbournes was the prototype reality show depicting the family life of a celebrity. And it changed the rules of the game for 21st-century television, breaking ratings records. During the four seasons it aired, Ozzy Osbourne, who died Tuesday at the age of 76, was more than just a hard rock legend and frontman of Black Sabbath.
Between 2002 and 2005, the Briton became a television star thanks to The Osbournes and the patriarch of the reality TV royal family, which paved the way for Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie, and the Kardashians.
In the early years of the 21st century, MTV decided to abandon music videos in favor of a reality-based programming approach. They had found success experimenting with anonymous people, until one day they came up with the idea of following the daily life of a celebrity. The protagonist in question had to be someone who fit the MTV identity and who was bizarre enough to make their day-to-day existence interesting to the audience.
They pitched the idea to rock icon Osbourne and some of his family. His wife Sharon and two of his children, the then-teenaged Kelly and Jack, agreed to be part of a hitherto unseen format. For the first season, they were paid a total of $80,000 per episode, $20,000 each.
In the first 10 episodes, in addition to backstage footage at some of his concerts, the audience also went inside the Osbourne family home in Beverly Hills. They saw Ozzy fighting with a TV remote control that was too modern for him or complaining, ironically, that his neighbors played their music too loud. He also appeared to yell his wife’s name whenever he needed to solve even the smallest problem.
Not everything was an ode to the absurd. Life overtook reality and produced plots any television writer would dream of. The exhibitionist family suffered on camera when the matriarch was diagnosed with cancer. Ozzy began taking pills to cope with the anxiety caused by the idea of living without his wife and ended up suffering a terrible accident that nearly cost him his life. “As entertaining as ever, the Osbournes remain a wacky, harmlessly outrageous take on every family, as full of warmth as it is weird,” said The New York Times in 2002 regarding this dramatic plot.
The so-called Prince of Darkness became a heartwarming teddy bear, despite the thousands of swear words MTV had to edit out to get the show on air.
Overnight, the Osbourne family became America’s obsession. Their show was the most-watched on cable television, with eight million viewers following their daily misadventures. This success even led to them being invited to the annual White House Correspondents’ Dinner.
The family’s reach extended when the show premiered worldwide. Sharon Osbourne, who has since appeared on television non-stop, both as a judge on talent shows and as the host of women’s talk shows, became the clan’s manager. With an iron fist, she persuaded MTV to pay them between $5 million and $7 million per season to prevent the family from moving to another network. Forbes estimates that, between the network’s salary and the resulting advertising deals, the family pocketed $40 million over four seasons.
In successive sequels and spin-offs of the pioneering reality show on global television, audiences saw the family move back to the United Kingdom after spending 20 years in Los Angeles and how Ozzy’s health suffered, the singer having battled Parkinson’s disease since 2020.
Despite not having a conventional family, Ozzy surprised audiences by revealing himself to be a loving, protective, and attentive father to Jack and Kelly. Showing the musician’s softer side didn’t harm his career as a rock star. Quite the opposite: it gave him his first number one hit in the competitive British market when he released a duet with his daughter Kelly. It was a cover of one of the classics popularized by Black Sabbath 30 years earlier, the ballad Changes.
Every time Crazy Train, another of the band’s old hits, played in the opening credits of the show, Ozzy brought his music to a new generation of music lovers. Without his reality show, the musician probably wouldn’t have been able to enjoy the massive tours he performed over the past 20 years. His final concert, a couple of weeks before his death in his hometown of Birmingham, drew a live audience of 45,000 people in early July. Nearly six million viewers tuned in to the live broadcast via streaming.
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