The Osbournes at 20: How the rowdy reality series changed TV forever, from dog poo drama to family feuds

The Prince of Darkness has been outwitted by a television remote. In fairness to Ozzy Osbourne, perched on the edge of his flowery antique sofa in Beverly Hills, it is a monstrously unwieldy device. He grasps the thing with both hands and slams it with his fist, but still he can’t figure out how to get the television to show him anything other than the weather in Afghanistan (“2000 degrees and cloudy”, he huffs). “I’m a very simple man. You’ve got to have computer knowledge to turn the f***ing TV on and off,” moans Ozzy. “I pressed this one button, and the shower started. I’m going: ‘What is this? Where am I, man?’”

This was how we found Ozzy Osbourne in the opening episode of MTV’s The Osbournes. Premiering on 5 March 2002, it changed the shape of reality television forever and Ozzy’s slapstick struggles against the big remote set the raucous, sweary tone. The mundane was elevated to the level of rock’n’roll farce and its success was unprecedented.

While the series had a surprisingly short run – just four seasons over the course of three years – it has had an outsized impact on pop culture. The first show of its kind to win an Emmy, it paved the way for Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie’s The Simple Life in 2003 and society-devouring behemoth Keeping up with the Kardashians, which followed in 2007. In 2019, SiriusXM reporter Jess Cagle put it to matriarch Sharon Osbourne that: “Without you, you realise, there would be no Kardashians. There would be no nothing without you, Sharon Osbourne!” “It was really Ozzy,” she demurred. “He was the one that was in the public eye. He was the celebrity, and he’s the one that took all the risks. We didn’t, the kids and I, but he took a huge risk. I think it paid off for Ozzy because people saw how funny he is. He’s just hysterical, and a teddy bear.”

In 2002, Ozzy Osbourne didn’t seem like an obvious bet for reality TV. The cocaine-guzzling, bat-munching wildman of heavy metal had first found fame as the frontman of Black Sabbath in the Seventies. A successful solo career followed, but by the turn of the century his star was starting to dim. Ozzy was in danger of becoming little more than a nostalgia act. But thanks to The Osbournes, he was introduced to a new generation who may not have clocked that the show’s theme tune was Ozzy’s own 1980 single “Crazy Train”, albeit covered in schmaltzy big band style by crooner Pat Boone. It was only in 2003, after the series had made him a household name once more, that Ozzy celebrated his first UK No 1 hit. The song owed its existence and success to The Osbournes: it was a cover of Black Sabbath’s “Changes”, performed with his teenage daughter Kelly, who launched her own briefly successful music career off the back of the show.

Last year, speaking on the Armchair Expert podcast, Kelly – who was 17 when the show began – described how naive the family had been when it came to handing their entire lives over to MTV producers. “You have to remember, no one had ever done what we did before,” she said. “So as we were doing it, we didn’t know either. We didn’t know what they were going to use, and what they weren’t, because they filmed everything. Everything.”

She went on to explain that she had a camera in her bedroom. With the cameras constantly filming, she would have to cover it every time she changed clothes, a position it seems hard to believe producers thought was acceptable to put a teenage girl in. “I remember the night before [the first episode] aired my mum took us to Venice Beach, we went to go see the drum circle, and we were like: ‘Did we just make the biggest mistake we’ve ever made in our lives?’” she said. “Then the next day, everything changed. It was like Beatlemania, except for The Osbournes… I didn’t think anyone would ever care about me. It was a show about my dad, and I was just in the family.”

On the contrary, the show made stars of them all, including Kelly’s younger brother Jack, who was 16 as the first season aired. Speaking on the Mind Wide Open podcast last year, Jack outlined how difficult it was to be thrust blinking into the limelight.

“Fame is torturous, and as a child … [being] on this hugely successful show kind of happened very accidentally,” he said. “I struggled a lot with depression even before the show, and then once the show kicked off I kind of fell into drugs and alcohol. And it was pretty aggressive. I often joke that I picked up a good, healthy Oxycontin habit.” Jack ended up in rehab at just 17. “I’ve been sober ever since, but it took a lot of self-work.”

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There was one member of the family who had the foresight to see quite how earth-shattering the experience might be: eldest sibling Aimee, then 18. She never appeared on the show, telling The Independent in 2015: “Back then, I still felt I was trying to figure out who I was in the chaos of family life, so why on earth would I want that portrayed on television? I wanted to protect myself, my parents, my siblings, too. They were very young, very impressionable.” Appearing on chat show The Talk in 2020, Sharon said she understood Aimee’s reservations. “It was chaos,” she said. “We had about 30 crew, 24 hours a day. The house wasn’t a home any more, it was a studio, so I get why she didn’t like it.”

The Osbournes may have been hell for the family, but it made for ratings gold. The show was never short of incident, some of it of the life-and-death variety. In the second season, Sharon beat cancer, and in the third, Ozzy recovered from a quad bike crash that nearly killed him. Often though, it was the humdrum that made for the most compelling moments. In one memorable episode, the family contended with their pet dogs pooing all over the house. “I’m not picking up dog s***, I’m a rock star!” exclaimed Ozzy. An MTV producer dreamed up the idea of bringing in a dog therapist. Ozzy wasn’t keen. “You don’t need to hire a dog therapist,” he protested. “You just need to wake up at 7am and open the f***ing door!”

While MTV had already enjoyed success with reality shows like The Real World and Cribs, The Osbournes surpassed them all. It quickly became not just the highest-rated series in the channel’s 20-year history but also the most-watched show on any cable station, pulling in an average of 5.3 million viewers during its first season with a peak of more than 7.2 million viewers for the finale. It ended not because of declining ratings, but because the family simply couldn’t stand it any longer. “The level of success that TV show got us was too much,” Ozzy told NME in 2020. “I’m not upset that I did it, but I wouldn’t do it again. People were going: ‘Aren’t you worried about losing your fans?’ I said: ‘I’m not worried about losing my fans – I’m worried about losing my f***ing mind.’”

Last year, rumours circulated that Sharon was planning to revive the show. The financial incentive is clear, with a reported $20m payday – but it’s unlikely that a sequel could ever have the same impact as the original. At the time, it was still novel to see a real family let it all hang out on TV; these days it couldn’t be more commonplace, from the genial domesticity of Gogglebox through to the Kardashian’s newly revamped show, now simply titled The Kardashians. The Osbournes changed television not because of how strange and outlandish they were, but how ordinary. For all the extravagant trappings of their Beverly Hills mansion, this was a Brummie family shouting and swearing but in the end getting along. All of us could relate to Ozzy’s despairing verdict on his household. “I love you all, I love you more than life itself,” he told them in episode one. “But you’re all f***in’ mad.”