bigjim25

March 7, 2002, 12:30 pm PT
The Osbournes, the unscripted "reality sitcom" showcasing the life of rocker Ozzy Osbourne and his family, scored a 2.8 household rating with its debut episode on Tuesday (March 5). This gave MTV it's highest debut rating for any of its series. Meanwhile, the show has also been receiving rave reviews in such publications as Time. MTV has bought 13 episodes of the series. (Carrie Borzillo-Vrenna)

From the mock wholesome sitcom family intro to the previews of the next episode, MTV's debut of The Osbournes Tuesday (March 5) night was nonstop hilarity.

The unscripted "reality sitcom" shows rocker Ozzy Osbourne and his family (sans oldest daughter, Amy, who isn't exactly down with this experience) moving into their new house (boxes to unpack included one labeled "Dead Things"), trying to set up their hi-tech TV set, accompanying their father to The Tonight Show with Jay Leno (where Ozzy gets stuck in the make-up chair), fighting, and more.

Highlights include:


24 bleeps for profanity before the first commercial break. The show had a total of 53 bleeps. Yes, we counted, however, our constant laughter might have made us miss a bleep or two!

An exchange between younger daughter, Kelly (who has a train track on her wall featuring a train dubbed "Crazy Train"), and her father where she complains that everyone else heard what was being said but him, to which Ozzy replies, "You have not been standing in front of 30 billion decibels for 35 years. Write me a note."

Fatherly advice from Ozzy to Kelly and son, Jack: "Don't drink, or take drugs. If you have sex, wear a condom." Oh, the irony.

Quote of the night: "I love you all, but you're all ****ing mad," Ozzy to his constantly bickering kids.

The preview for the next episode shows wife Sharon upset that the dogs peed on her new couch, so she brings in a pet therapist, to which Ozzy says, "You don't need a therapist, you just need to get up at 7 and open a ****ing door!"
A must-see even if you're not a fan of Ozzy's music!
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Jan 15, 2002, 11:30 am PT

Ever wonder what it's like to live with Ozzy Osbourne? MTV viewers will find out beginning March 5 (10:30 p.m.), when the network premieres what MTV Entertainment President Brian Graden described as "America's first reality sitcom."

Speaking to the Television Critics Association on Monday (Jan. 14) in Pasadena, Calif., Graden introduced clips from The Osbournes, a new series following the lives of heavy metal icon Osbourne, his manager wife Sharon, and two of their three teenage kids, Kelly, 17, and Jack, 16.

Cameras have followed the family 24/7 (except Sundays) since summer's successful Ozzfest tour, moving with them into a new home—their 24th—last fall, with access to every room but the bathrooms and master bedroom. Tape continued to roll for future episodes as the Osbournes discussed their life-in-a-fishbowl experience.

"I just thought America needed to see what a normal family was really like," said Sharon, noting that the positive reception toward Ozzy's episode of MTV's Cribs was a deciding factor in agreeing to do the show. "What you see on that program is what went down …, none of it is scripted," said Ozzy. "There is the good, the bad, and the ugly in this… I didn't want to tidy up the stuff for this show. What you see is what you get."

You do see the rock star wrestling with a complicated TV remote, Kelly getting a tattoo, and Jack setting the kitchen afire. But you don't get eldest child Aimee, 18, who lives in the home's guest house and isn't participating because, her mom explained, "She's working on her own career as a singer. She didn't want to be involved in this program because she felt that starting a new career …, she didn't want to be bunched in with all of us lunatics."

The family also weighed in on good neighbors (ex crooner-next-door Pat Boone) and bad (the current folk who've initiated a feud by playing folk music loudly in the wee hours of the morning) and Ozzfest, which Jack described as "heavy metal summer camp." The summer 2002 edition is being booked now, with an eye toward a May 23 kickoff in Europe and a July 10 start in the U.S. Other than Osbourne, no bands have been set.

The metal patriarch's mumbled delivery had one reporter asking Graden if the aging Brit would be close-captioned. (He won't.) But the audio censor is having a field day. "On average, every third word is a bleep," Ozzy admitted.

The Osbournes will run for "at least six or eight episodes, but by the time it airs it may be 10," Graden said later. "We can keep going as long as they're comfortable."

An Ozzie and Harriet this is not.

-- Gerri Miller from CDnow

Giantrobo

if you've ever heard Ozzy and his family in interviews then you know they're totally nuts.

This should be interesting.

Jackskeleton

then again, hearing ozzy talk sometimes just sounds like a bunch of mumbles to the untrained ear.

Jason

I'd rather see this as an HBO series or special.

Josh-da-man

OZZY RULES

Gunshy

[METALRULES][/METALRULES]

-Gunshy

Goat3001

METAL OWNS!!!

demonio

haha, I first heard about this in the new Rolling Stone, this show is gonna RAWK!!

Ozzy is the man!

SnoopDogg

Man, I didn't even know they had a third child till the last Cribs when they mentioned her, this show is going to awesome, I will be there.

bigjim25

Just a reminder that the show premieres MARCH 5th at 10:30pm on MTV!
Click here to see OZZY & Family on the cover TV Guide.

benedict

This is true. What is weird is that when he does an impersonation - including an impersonation of someone from his home town, effectively his own voice from his youth - the mumbling disappears and he is perfectly intelligible. It is a bit like people who stammer except when they listen to white noise.

<small>There is probably a million-dollar scientific study in this somewhere! I already have my own views as to the reasons for the phenomenon.</small>

BDB

This will be a classic for the ages, Ozzy is mental, and the kids are stars.

If you saw any of the ozzy cribs, and there have been 3 you will know what to expect, I think it's on at 10pm

SnoopDogg

I will be watching, should be "interesting" the last cribs they had when Ozzie was have a fit and didn't want to talk to anybody was funny as hell.

einTier

What time? Man, this is going to be great.

Ozzy:"You people are ****ing neurotic"

umm... hello pot? This is the kettle. You're black.

BDB

Airs Tuesdays at 10:30 p.m. (ET/PT), 9:30 p.m.(CT).

I will see it at 7:30 as my directv shows MTV on the East Coast Schedule which is cool for this kind of thing.

and if you watch MTV you can see that Tenacious D are doing promo spots for it.

BDB

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/articl...5/DD199869.DTL


Ozzy Osbourne loves his Pomeranians. He can't work the remote, and he gets nervous about doing the "Tonight" show.

The lead singer of Black Sabbath, the prototypical gloom-and-doom heavy metal band, is not quite the one-man wrecking crew he's perceived to be.

"I'm not the kind of person you think I am," he bleats on "Gets Me Through, " the best song on his new solo album. "I'm not the Antichrist or the Iron Man. "

Tonight, we'll get a chance to see for ourselves as MTV introduces "The Osbournes," its thoroughly inspired twist on the reality-TV phenomenon. The half-hour program, set up like a classically dippy sitcom, is actually footage of the everyday goings-on at the Osbourne manse in Beverly Hills, with wife Sharon, teenage children Jack and Kelly and the dim-bulb dad himself.

It's a spin-off of sorts from two other MTV originals, "The Real World" and the houses-of-the-stars show "Cribs," which once featured the Osbournes.

And it's a stroke of absurdist genius, beginning with the theme song, a schmaltzy, Vegas-y version of Ozzy's solo hit "Crazy Train": "Maybe it's not too late," croons a generic lounge lizard, "to learn how to love, and forget how to hate."

"Meet the perfect American family," welcomes the unctuous narrator, as the cameras show the siblings sniping at each other, Ozzy looking for a place to store his rifle and the whole family using words that fill the show with the rhythmic sound of recurring censors' bleeps.

Ozzy, 53, ponytailed, generously tattooed and a little thick around the middle, comes across like the forgotten man of the house. While the kids bicker and their mother conducts a stream of assistants and cable guys, the heavy metal maniac who was once arrested on charges of attacking his own wife shuffles around aimlessly in his sweatpants.

Having successfully completed rehab several years ago, Ozzy has been utterly domesticated. His expression is perpetually dazed, as if he's just been whacked in the forehead with a 2-by-4. It's priceless.

In tonight's episode, the family has just moved into its new house. By Sharon's count, it's at least the 24th new home of the kids' young lives. Moving boxes are labeled with their contents: "Pots and Pans," "Linens," "Devil Heads."

In next week's episode, the family deals with its growing collection of dogs and their refusal to be housebroken. When Jack's new bulldog, Lola, leaves another steaming pile in the living room, the son chides his mother.

"You know why my dog's dysfunctional?" he asks. "Because he's angry at you - - just like me."

Meanwhile, Ozzy wanders into the kitchen, fresh from bed. "I love the smell of armpits in the morning," he offers, apropos of nothing. "It's like victory."

"You couldn't script dialogue as funny as what comes out of their mouths," says Lois Curren, an MTV senior vice president. "It's riveting TV."

The perception of Ozzy as a mythic, dove-beheading lunatic makes his real life that much funnier, she agrees.

"He's the Prince of Darkness!" she jokes. In truth, she says, he's a good father. His past indiscretions are now cautionary tales.

In tonight's episode the children are getting ready for a night out with friends on Sunset Strip. "Please don't get drunk or stoned tonight," Ozzy pleads. "And if you have sex, wear a condom."

With precious little in the way of plot, it's the little things that make "The Osbournes" such an unexpected delight.

"There's a tiny scene in the second episode where Ozzy is trying to turn on the vacuum cleaner," says MTV's Curren. "I've never seen anything so funny in my life."



--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
THE OSBOURNES: Reality sitcom. Premieres at 10:30 tonight on MTV.
E-mail James Sullivan at [email protected].

lorenzoh

I going to mix a large Vodka/OJ and let this show just wash over me like all classic tv does.

Blade

I merged them...and moved everything to TV Talk. Hmm. Don't know why I didn't move this earlier. Sorry about that.

BDB

Now that is quality television.


'I love you all, I love yoi more than life, but your all f'in nuts.'

Ozzy is insane. And the kids even more so.

Blaster1

This show is hilarious. I'm definitely going to keep watching this

AJW

The look on the security guard's face was classic.

SnoopDogg

Wow, I thought it was great. I will be watching every week I am pretty sure.

wm lopez

1st , I am not a Die Hard Ozzy fan!
But after watching this show tonite, this is MTV's greatest show ever! Hand the show an Emmy right now!
The generation that grew up on The Addams Family will love this because it's not an act. The show needs better ads promotinf the show. I thought it was going to be like spoof or something, and it's not it's all real. I can't praise this show enough.

harpo787

Agreed, AJW...that security guard was all smiles and joy until he and Ozzy sat and watched Ozzy's performance on Tonight Show. That man's face was just....he was truly stunned/baffled.

That and Ozzy trying to work the remote...and the shower comes on? Did I hear that right? But boy was he ready to throw that remote through the tv!

I've always loved getting to hear Ozzy talk, as I'm a fan of translating what is apparently "english" into...well...english. I too am tuning in weekly to watch this one....

So when's the DVD come out?

demonio

this show kicked ass man, his daughter is the craziest one of the bunch though I believe.

watching every week now bygod.