The Osbournes
The reality show that turned a heavy-metal legend into a beloved, bumbling TV dad. Premiering on MTV on March 5, 2002, it followed Ozzy Osbourne and his family — wife Sharon, son Jack, and daughter Kelly — through the chaos of daily life in their Beverly Hills mansion. Ozzy shuffling around cursing at the remote control became one of the decade's defining TV images, and the show's runaway success helped invent the celebrity-family reality genre.
The Osbournes premiered on MTV on March 5, 2002, a reality series documenting the domestic life of heavy-metal singer Ozzy Osbourne and his family in their Beverly Hills home. The core cast was Ozzy; his wife and manager, Sharon; their son, Jack; and their daughter, Kelly. The couple's third child, Aimee, declined to participate — she publicly criticized her parents over the show and is either absent or blurred in the family photos shown on it.
The appeal was the gap between the reputation and the reality. Here was Ozzy Osbourne, the heavy-metal singer, reduced on screen to a mumbling, disoriented father fumbling with household technology and pleading for calm amid the family's constant bickering. Audiences responded in enormous numbers: during its first season, The Osbournes became the most-viewed series ever on MTV, and it won the 2002 Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Reality Program.
The show ran for four seasons and 52 episodes, filmed from October 2001 to March 2005, with the final episode airing on March 21, 2005. Its influence outlasted its run. By putting a famous family's ordinary, unscripted life at the center of the show, The Osbournes established the template for a whole wave of celebrity-family reality series that followed in the years to come.
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