(AP PHOTO/Stefan Rousseau)

Reality Takes a Holiday: Ozzy and The Osbournes

by Scott Thill

"I don't quite get it. We're just a little grain of sand. We're in Washington with the most powerful man in the world. Why should anyone give a shit about us?" -- Sharon Osbourne

When I was a 12-year-old idiot hanging on the streets of Long Beach when I should've been in class at Franklin Junior High, I smoked my first joint with a group of headbangers and listened, rapt with fear, to Ozzy Osbourne and Black Sabbath churn through "Paranoid" and "War Pigs." His maniacal cackles on the song "Black Sabbath" alone put a scare into me for at least one year.

Nearly a decade later, Ozzy sang "Paranoid", a desperate metal stomp about a person who has reached the end of his rope, for the Queen of England. And talk about your strange company: Osbourne was featured alongside a smattering of rock 'n' roll heavyweights (Paul McCartney, Eric Clapton, and Elton John) and lightweights (Phil Collins and the awful Ricky Martin). This is the same man who once chewed the heads off of a bat and a dove, drank and drugged himself into near-oblivion, and was sued by distraught and misguided parents who blamed his song, "Suicide Solution," for their son's suicidal solution to his own teen angst. This is also a man that can currently barely operate his own remote control but nevertheless has ironically displaced Howard Stern as the King of All Media.

Forget the queen, God save MTV.

Why? Because, sooner or later, you knew that the megalomaniacal media empire that more or less spawned this horrid, so-called "Reality TV" age we are now mired in was going to have to come up with something to justify all of the torture they have put us through for more than a decade. After countless years of worthless shows (The Real World [s], Road Rules, et. al.) about how their privileged demographic can or cannot live under one roof, travel under one car, or not help but screw up one opportunity after the other, they finally decided to throw all of their formulas into a similar equation and broadcast one of the funniest and most mundane shows ever to twist television convention into a knot of useless strands: The Osbournes.

They're kooky and they're creepy, the Ozzy Family! "Sooner or later, you knew that MTV was going to come up with something to justify all of the torture they've put us through." (Photo: MTV via Reuters)

You should have heard of the show by now -- Dan Quayle has. Yeah, the same ex-Vice President of the United States who once ripped Murphy Brown a new one for allowing its show's star, Candace Bergen, to have the gall to become a single mother on TV is now a fan of Ozzy and his expletive-filled domestic paradise. Although Quayle's logic is as simplistic and confused as ever -- whereas he criticized Bergen's decision as a "mock[ery] of fathers in the name of a 'lifestyle choice'" -- the "dysfunctional" Ozzy's more destructive lifestyle choices are "a great anti-drug promotion". Why? Because, Quayle asserts, "he fried his brains . . . from taking drugs all those years", something that will (not should, according to the confident ex-Veep) prompt "everyone" to "say, 'I don't want to be like that'".

Remind yourselves that he is talking about the countless viewers of The Osbournes that have recently helped the show become the highest-rated cable program ever, as well as netted Ozzy and Co. a nice $20 million dollar contract for next season. Come again? If, as Quayle argued years ago and politicians still do today, it is true that teens lacking in his privileged version of family values are dumbly susceptible to mimicry of lifestyle choices they find on their popular media, then what exactly will stop the usual slew of knucklehead teens and adults who go out and attempt the visibly dangerous stunts they see on Jackass, professional wrestling, Fear Factor, ad nauseam, from following in Ozzy's drunken footsteps? Especially when they see that the rewards could be countless millions, hordes of followers, their own TV show, and an audience with not just the Queen of England, but also the President of the United States (a guy who knows a thing or two about drinking and partying)?

Um, wait. Which one is supposed to be the Prince of Darkness again? President Bush (no stranger to narcotics himself) gives Ozzy the D.C. props, while some suit flashes the devil horns from his stoner days now long past. Ah, youth! (William Philpott/Reuters)

Like I said, Quayle's "monkey see-monkey do" (or do not) logic doesn't hold up in a complex real world not of MTV's making. Plus, Ozzy was already a demigod of music before he became a Nielsen ratings gimme. What's a good excuse for not trying to be like him? There really isn't one.

In truth, reality is a bit more complex than the rich-kid "reality" bestowed upon Quayle, Bush, and their buddies, The Osbournes. If Sharon Osbourne has no idea why she's at a dignitary-stuffed Washington dinner, then it's pretty obvious that Ozzy himself, the same zombie that wanders around his sprawling Beverly Hills abode looking about as coherent as Rain Man on a good day, doesn't either.

And this may be the singular gift of MTV's most likely short-lived series (hey, this is reality, after all; how long did you figure they could milk this thing?). It has about as much to do with documented reality as Ozzy has to do with Quayle's perverted ideas of family values. The Osbournes differs from the throng of other so-called "reality" shows because its subjects are so far removed from the aspects of Ordinary Life that even they can't quite figure out what they're doing at a White House function. Where Survivor, Fear Factor, Real World, etc. placed their wannabe celebs/"ordinary" people in constructed, manipulated, and sometimes degrading environments (see Who Wants to Marry a Millionaire?) to seduce viewers by provoking them into loving, hating or lambasting what they see, The Osbournes, through some hilarious editing, has replaced that glass between subject and object, voyeur and action, inside and outside, celebrity and normalcy. There is simply no way that we can place ourselves into Ozzy or his family's skin, just their world.

OK, Ozzy, we get it. You bite animals! Osbourne gets friendly with Kermit the Frog at Queen Elizabeth's Jubilee. (Peter Jorden/Reuters)

Rather, The Osbournes is a behind-the-music (sorry, VH1) peek at a guy who more or less is the consensually nominated, earthly form of the Prince of Darkness; something he says as he's launching another expletive-laced tirade in response to Sharon's hilarious insertion of a bubble machine into his stage act. Meanwhile, Sharon is the true star of The Osbournes, if only because she runs Ozzy and his house like she was running a 5K: with a maximum of spirit and a minimum of effort. She's the quintessential Beverly Hills housewife in appearance: she wants the fake tits, has got the clothes, and boasts a nanny who watches over her lunatic children, but the similarities end about there. She's not afraid to tell her children to screw themselves (something you never see from Brentwood to Bel Air), and she's not afraid to put her hands in her pants to smear whatever she finds on her daughter's face. Sharon channels more Edina (the continually boozed, drugged mum from Absolutely Fabulous) than Donna Reed or Barbara Bush.

The kids themselves are pieces of work and fun as hell to watch, mostly because you can tell that some of their tantrums spring from the ineluctable fact that they know they are being watched. Plus, watching the continually haggard Ozzy try as hard as he might to cook popcorn in a microwave he clearly cannot operate is a hoot that sends me into a laughing fit if I even try to visualize it. And the editors at MTV -- God bless 'em -- know how to punctuate such ludicrous moments: picture a hopelessly perplexed Ozzy, Beverly Hills' Prince of Darkness, peering dumbly into a microwave's window as George Gershwin's "Summertime" jazzes in the background, and you have a pop-culture allusion-fest deserving of The Simpsons.

MORE MORPHIZM

"Word comes that brother Cat Stevens refuses to lend his support to our virtuous jihad. May this turncoat's Peace Train be laden with explosives and rammed into the Mountain of Mohammed, peace be upon him. "

"My father's side of the family had the good fortune to be on the route of the first missionaries bringing Christianity to Korea, so we jumped on the Jesus bandwagon before it got all crowded with Buddhist poseurs..."

"The aptly named Carney thought that Asian-Americans would find 'Two Wongs Can Make it White' cheeky and irreverent? Maybe if they, like Abercrombie &Fitch, weren't thinking."

"In our Look Smart section, we explore the fashion needs of former priests. We'll show you 20 ways to mix-n-match black pants, black shoes, and a black turtleneck without busting your budget."

"The guidelines for white people will be different than for others. They will be advised to refer to the U.S. Federal Standard 595B Color Chart (or the Ralph Lauren color chip guide at Home Depot) to determine the range of colors permissible in a potential spouse."

Trust me, I hate MTV -- the M still stands for music, right? -- with almost every bone in my body; no, this isn't nostalgia talking, but they are a far cry from the channel that brought some of us Yo! MTV Raps, 120 Minutes, The Young Ones, Ren and Stimpy, Liquid Television, and more. Before The Osbournes, I valued their cultural worth somewhere between Milli Vanilli (the pariah lip-synchers MTV helped explode, by the way) and the Yugo, because they simply couldn't help but cater to anything else other than the 13-year-old demographic obsessed with boy bands, Madonna-wannabes, and watching teenagers snipe at each other as if there is neither a world after high school or a subject on earth more interesting than themselves.

MTV used to have shows on racism, now they have exposés on, that's right, groupies.

But it seems that finally their tired tide is turning at last: in fact, my father was the person who turned me on to The Osbournes. Eventually MTV, like its viewers and the rest of the world (that is now at war, of all things), had to grow up and out of its infantile boy band pop universe. Right?

Exactly, and therein lies The Osbournes' possibly accidental but certainly appreciated maneuver: positing a collection of spoiled, foul-mouthed subjects who live in a netherworld of riches and luxury as somehow split down the middle as either adults or children. Truth is, the Osbournes are neither and both at the same time. They are the last vestige -- and a hilarious last gasp -- of a ludicrous "reality" that MTV has spent ten-plus years honing like it was another psychoanalytic imaginary. Nothing in The Osbournes is remotely associated with reality, and I don't care if there really is an Ozzy, Sharon, Kelly and Jack Osbourne. This show is simply one, long elaborately constructed comedy featuring a soundtrack of endless "fucks". Forget emotional investment, domestic or personal drama, empathy or understanding. Forget pulling the heartstrings or elevating the intellect, invigorating jealousies or transmitting energies, because this ain't art, baby. It's pure spectacle featuring a more privileged version of an ex-substance abuser's own youth come back to haunt him every second of his attention-deficit-disorder existence.

And it's funny as hell. "I love you all more than life itself, but you're all fucking mad", Ozzy tells his clan one morning in the kitchen.

Which makes us all the scientists who have to maintain that suspicious distance in order to fully comprehend the strange disorder wracking The Osbournes' collective body. Finally, after all this "Reality TV" saturation, we're allowed to back up and remind ourselves that we are what normal looks like. And that The Osbournes, and to a greater extent those brats in Real World, the wannabe celebs in Survivor, or the "couples" in Temptation Island, are just simulacra that look and walk like us.

Scott Thill is a gainfully employed dotcom editor at a multinational media empire currently finishing his first novel, The Dangerous Perhaps. He longer partakes in illegal substances of any kind.