The Prince of Darkness himself, Ozzy Osbourne, has weighed in on the reality TV landscape, and his verdict is decidedly unimpressed.
In a recent interview with Spin magazine, Osbourne dismissed today's reality shows as "not the real, real reality," contrasting them with the raw, unfiltered chaos that played out on his own family's show, "The Osbournes," back in the early 2000s.
“What they do now is kind of scripted reality,” Osbourne explained. “It’s not raw. It’s not the real, real reality. With our show, what you saw was what really went on. It wasn’t contrived. It wasn’t scripted.”
The Osbournes was among the first wave of reality TV shows to take off in the twenty-first century ran for four seasons from 2002 to 2005. The programme chronicled the lives of Osbourne, Sharon, their two kids, Jack and Kelly.
“The reality show wasn’t anything different than our regular life, because that’s the way we are anyway,” he said. “We didn’t become the Osbournes that you see just for the show. That’s the way we are, and all they did was take funny bits out of it.”
Osbourne later added, “It’s really interesting because people love the Kardashians. They took it one stage further. They saw what we did and said, ‘That’s a good idea,’ but they organized themselves.”
According to the musician, his family approached their show in a particular way and decided to continue the reality series only if their entire family supported it and it felt appropriate.
“At the end of the day, every season, my wife would sit us all down and go, ‘Alright, what do you want to do? Do you want to do another season or not?’” Osbourne recalled. “After the third year, the [production crew and MTV] started to ask us to do things that we wouldn’t normally do. At that point, I lost interest in it.”
