There are many things to say about John Michael Osbourne, son of Birmingham, Aston Villa fan, grandfather of heavy metal, the unhinged, binge-drinking, drug hoovering “Prince of Darkness”, who died this week at the age of 76 after a long battle with Parkinson’s.
Ozzy, as the world knew him for more than 50 years, was a heavy rock and roll legend and his influence as the frontman of Black Sabbath, and later as a solo artist, is likely to outlive us all. He sold more than 100-million records, was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (as a member of Black Sabbath and a solo artist), has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame and on the Birmingham Walk of Stars. There is no statue of him yet in his hometown, though a “large-scale steam-punk style mechanical bull” named Ozzy was created for the Birmingham Commonwealth Games in 2022.
Music journalists worldwide will write countless lines about Osbourne’s place in the rock pantheon, the influence of his work on shaping the genre and the poignant scenes of Black Sabbath’s farewell performance, with an ailing Prince of Darkness leading them in front of a 45,000-strong crowd from his seated throne at Villa Park only a few weeks before his death.
But there’s another far darker accolade that many will bestow on Osbourne and that’s as the unintended but undeniable dark prince of reality TV — a genre far more evil than heavy metal.
From 2002 to 2005 Ozzy became the globally recognised and Sharon-hollering star of The Osbournes, an MTV reality TV show that changed the genre forever. It also opened the door to the end of the music channel as a place to watch music videos and its ugly rebirth as a place to watch everything from spoilt teenage girls to pop stars’ rocky marriages. It also transformed the image of Ozzy from bat-head-biting hedonist rock god, to shuffling, technologically inept, devoted, gently teased and bullied dad. The popular image of Ozzy was neatly divided between his before and after The Osbournes eras.
It all began, as former MTV head Van Toffler told Variety this week, after MTV cameras made a visit to Ozzy’s LA home for MTV Cribs — a show that provided a peak inside celebrities’ homes — in the early 2000s. “We were looking to launch Cribs, and we shot a bit with the Osbournes, and we all kind of looked at each other and just felt there is some wonderful, serendipitous chaos and insanity in this house that people would eat up. What a loving, dysfunctional, chaotic, musical family they were. And it just hit us to keep shooting, which went on for years,” Toffler recalled.
The contrast between the Satanic dark lord of rock and the fuzzy, put-upon dad at home was the show’s strongest selling point. The world soon came to realise — as Ozzy had always known — that if there was a dark lord in the Osbourne house, it wasn’t him. That title fell to his wife, Sharon, the ruthless, strong-willed woman who managed his career, had scared him sober and knew how to turn the show into a global phenomenon that would make her family rich and famous beyond their status as Ozzy’s beloved clan.
“Sharon grew up with a very passionate manager of a dad who was notorious in his own right, and Sharon fought for what she believed her family deserved. A lot of, let’s say, screams and shouting matches around it, but it was all fine in the end,” Toffler says.
“The Osbournes revealed to people that they could have an alternative career, beyond music in Ozzy’s case, or management in Sharon’s. That they could have a revelatory show about their lives that was different from the core way they became famous.”
The Osbournes was an unscripted family sitcom, and MTV smartly packaged it as such. From its jazz lounge version of Ozzy’s hit Crazy Train as its opening theme, to its Married with Children style intro of the characters, the show leant into its identity as a real show about a very famous real dad and the family he loved, even as they drove him mental.
Ozzy sipped Diet Coke, warned his son Jack and daughter Kelly not to drink and take drugs when they went out, screamed at his TV as he tried to find the History Channel, got into a shouting match with the voice-activated CD player in his car, and battled with his neighbours for playing their music too loud. He was loud, he was funny, he was curious, but he also cared deeply about his wife and children, and the world loved him even more because of it.
Though it only ran for four seasons and 52 episodes, The Osbournes changed the face of the genre it pioneered. There was reality TV before it and reality TV after it, and the cringeworthy, voyeuristic mess it left in its wake is both its fault and unintended consequence.
As Jack Black quipped at Osbourne’s induction as a solo artist to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame last year, teaming “up with his family to create another genre, reality TV”, was “maybe the most evil thing he ever did”.
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