The Osbournes

I must say that when I saw the promos for this show it looked *interesting*, but I thought SURELY I'd get bored after the first episode. Not true! This is the funniest darn show I've seen ever on TV, and that includes old favorites like Cheers, Frasier, Roseanne and Murphy Brown. Forget that it's the best show on cable, it's the best show on TV, period! And this from a 37 year old who should be ashamed of themself for watching something like this. :)

Funny, irreverant, rude, crude, disgusting (all the close-ups of the dog's poo). It's all of that, and more. I've never laughed as hard as I have over a family's problems like I have for the Osbournes champagne problems (Kelly losing Ozzy's gold card when she wasn't even supposed to have it, or throwing fruit and hams at their noisy next door neighbors). I also love the way Kelly went shopping in Beverly Hills with her mother wearing pink, fuzzy slippers. Only in Hollywood.

Then of course there was the episode where Ozzy is absolutely AGHAST that Sharon wants to use bubbles in his stage show. ("Bubbles! Oh come on Sharon! I'm Ozzy f*%$ing Osbourne! The prince of f*&$ing darkness man! I won't do it!"). Ozzy seems to bumble through every situation while Sharon lays down the law. That episode where he keeps wanting to leave when they are busting the kids for smoking pot and having fake ID's comes immediatley to mind.

This is reality television at it's best. Forget Survivor, Temptaion Island, Fear Factor and The Real World. Forget Must See TV on NBC on Thursdays, now it's Must See TV on MTV at 10:30 on Tuesdays. This is the new milenium of reality television! Watch this show! You'll be awfully glad you did.

Just watching Ozzy and Sharon on the Tonight Show, I "got" it, where the buzz was coming from. I hadn't seen "the Prince of Darkness" since Ozzfest '98, where women had his name painted on various body parts. Now here he was with his arm around his non-bimbo fuschia-haired wife of 20 years, dressed in black but with a goofy smile. I couldn't understand half of what he was saying, but I found myself hanging on every garbled word. He was so funny, so endearing, in a way I can't explain! I found "The Osbournes" to be the same way--hilarious and fascinating and endearing, inexplicably. I think it's largely the surreal juxtapositions of seeing someone "larger-than-life" live. Just watching him DO anything, from interacting with his kids, limping around his yard looking for his cat, or sitting coloring a picture...keeps me grinning. There are a couple people that hate this show (my aunt, Bill Cosby) and can't understand its success (and that's OK). That is because they don't latch on to its irony. With this show, you either "get" it or you don't.

You'll probably know in the first 5 minutes which camp you belong in.

Everyone is saying (on older reviews) that THE OSBOURNES needs to be streaming, and here it is, the day after Ozzy Osbourne died, and it's on Amazon... has been a few weeks actually... but now it must be getting more views than ever...

It's fun to watch, kind of like a rock star version of The Munsters, and the kids are funny and offbeat while Sharon is the perfect b-word-wife who has a heart of gold...

But there's a sad element watching, in retrospect, because it's been known since 2023 that Ozzy has had Parkinsons, which was diagnosed in 2003, which means he had it during this show...

And from episode one, the Parkinsons really shows... you can see it VERY clearly in his gait, and his trembling hands, which, originally, when this came out, it was as if Ozzy did too many drugs, or perhaps was suffering DT's... so people laughed about how he moved around, not knowing what we know now...

However, HE IS FUNNY, a kind of dry Peter Sellers quality combined with a Columbo-esque ability to hide a true genius that helped invent a brand of music called Heavy Metal (while Deep Purple and Led Zeppelin INFLUENCED metal, Sabbath INVENTED IT OUTRIGHT)...

So watching THE OSBOURNES is fun and addictive like reality shows are supposed to be... And it's obvious why it was such a smash hit way back when...

Yet it's now equally sad knowing what's known, and seeing what's completely and painfully obvious now.

Believe me, when I first heard about The Osbournes, I was rolling my eyes. Here goes another rich rock star, being trailed around by cameras. But after having seen several episodes, it's well worth it!

They say they are the picture perfect model of the disfunctional family, and that everyone in US can relate to them, and I agree (but not about the US thing, i'm from Asia)! All the cursing and screaming between Jack and Kelly, Kelly or Jack fighting with Sharon or Ozzy. Especially "disagreements" between Ozzy and Sharon are HILARIOUS. It makes me you think that your crazy family is not the only one in this world. Take away the silliness, and you've got a loving family.

Even though the show is *sometimes* a pain because of the frequent bleeping and Ozzy's hard to understand accent, I had fun watching this show. I didn't know how real this funny reality TV could be!

Yeah, you heard me right - this program is an intelligence test. Sit a bunch of people in a room and make them watch it for an hour, and their comments will let you know how intelligent they really are. It seems that the morons of the world only see a program where a stoned father allows a bitchy mother to run his life while his children (he actually has *at least* three, by the way) run amok.

The reality is that Ozzy Osbourne is a model of what I wish I could have had for a father. Not once have I seen Ozzy resort to terrorising his children, talking down at them as if they are lower than dung, or other deflations of his children's self-esteem. In fact, in all the interactions between Ozzy and his children, I see a man who would do anything to protect them in spite of the absurd situation that his career (which is still actually going strong) often puts them in. If I had parents like Ozzy and Sharon when I was Jack's age (as a reference, I'm a few years older than Aimee), I'd be a much better-adjusted person today. I've never seen Sharon pick up any of her children by the neck and smash their head on things.

The really sad part about the whole thing is that Ozzy is far more intelligent and calculating than his critics, but he will never get full credit for it. The whole show was merely conceived as a big swipe at the morons who would have us believe the Cosbys are the ideal family, as well as promotion for a new solo album (once the solo album publicity dies down, you can bet there will be another Black Sabbath reunion album). The worst thing about the way pop media portrays Ozzy today is that they dismiss him as irrelevant because they can't pidgeonhole him and make him fit into their narrow little approved genres. The sad fact is that Ozzy's music, and the music he makes with Sabbath in particular, is even more relevant today than it was thirty-two years ago. The world really has become that much more oppressive and bland in that time (and the company that bought out Ozzy's label in the 1990s, Sony, has had a lot to do with this, just to name one guilty party). Still, Ozzy and company have had a lot of bands follow in their footsteps (and I don't mean the Warrants and Poisons, et al, they are just tryhards), and some of them, like My DyING BRIDE, we should be eternally thankful for.

Many fans accuse Sharon of merely being a golddigger, and while it is almost certainly true that this show is more or less entirely her idea, the fact remains that Ozzy most likely would never have had a solo career if not for her. I do thoroughly detest Kelly, however. She really just seems content to ride on her father's coattails, something that Ozzy himself would have abhorred during his youth. Jack, however, is a very funny guy. He gives a great sense of being the tragic victim of the media obsession with his dad, and yet at the same time his sense of humour and his temper demonstrate that he is truly his father's son.

So all in all, if you've heard some Fundy moron tell you what a horrid family this is and how we should all be rallying against them - don't listen. I know my childhood would have been much happier if we'd had shows like this around to demonstrate to young parents like mine the RIGHT way to engage in conversation with your children. Even though Aimee was right to refuse to have anything to do with the show (I'm sure Kelly and Jack would have done the same if they were more "grown up"), it still makes me glad that in fifty years time, there will be shows like this to contrast against absolute slime like the Cosby show.