'There's just no family like them': How Ozzy and 'The Osbournes' conquered reality TV

Yahoo

29-07-2025

Greg Johnston, who produced all four seasons of the MTV show, remembers how the Prince of Darkness lit up reality TV in a new interview.
Ozzy Osbourne will forever be remembered as the 'Prince of F***ing Darkness' — the bat-biting, Alamo-excreting wild child who fronted Black Sabbath before launching a solo career and his own music festival, Ozzfest.
Not only was the British rocker, who died on July 22 at age 76, an inventor of heavy metal, winning five Grammys and a spot in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, but he also carved out a second career as an unlikely pioneer of reality television after The Osbournes debuted on MTV in 2002.
'Nobody in their right mind who had any sort of public persona would [have said yes to doing the show],' The Osbournes executive producer Greg Johnston tells Yahoo. 'There was no social media at that time. Everybody who was a celebrity or in the public eye was very guarded.'
Ozzy — along with his manager wife Sharon and two of their kids, Jack and Kelly — pulled back the curtain on the crazy train that was their life for the cameras. The foulmouthed family had just moved into a swanky Beverly Hills, Calif., mansion, made over with crucifixes everywhere, and chaos reigned supreme inside. Just not the typical rock star kind.
There were dogs and cats running amok (often urinating on the furniture), Sharon launching a ham over the neighbor's wall, the kids fighting (sometimes over Christina Aguilera) and Ozzy — patriarch of the madness — perpetually looking confused and calling: 'Sharon!'
The show, which became an instant hit, followed in the footsteps of MTV's Cribs, which peeked inside celebrity homes, and The Real World, where strangers lived together under constant surveillance. But The Osbournes was something else entirely. Raw and unpredictable, it offered a never-before-seen glimpse into the life of a celebrity family before reality TV became the norm.
What emerged onscreen was a surprisingly loving household. They were relatable — navigating health issues, parenting challenges, substance abuse, animal love, neighbor disputes and dad struggling to use the remote control.
'Even though they were in Beverly Hills and he was this crazy rock star, he was a loving father trying to deal with things things that any other person watching might be dealing with,' says Johnston, who went on to direct the 2020 documentary Biography: The Nine Lives of Ozzy Osbourne and produce the reality show Ozzy and Jack's World Detour, which ran from 2016 to 2018. ''F***, I can't work the remote either' or 'My cat got out and I couldn't get him back inside.' Just mundane and relatable situations they dealt with — and with a lot of love.'
After Ozzy's death, we caught up with Johnston to talk about his time with the metal legend and reality TV icon.
How came to be
'There was no expectation of a show,' Johnston says of the 2001 meet-and-greet at the Ivy in Santa Monica with MTV. The Osbournes had done an early episode of Cribs, which debuted in 2000, and there was discussion about what else was possible — like Kelly and Jack doing guest VJ spots or Ozzfest coverage.
'As you do, you talk about your lives when you're having lunch,' Johnston says. 'Sharon talked about hers — and everything that was going on — telling us about all the dogs they had and Ozzy waking up in the middle of the night and slipping on dog shit. She was just relaying [a story]. There was no pitch. Just sort of: 'Oh my god, I can't believe this happened last night. I'm so tired,' and it made us laugh. Every story that she told … we were dying.'
They left the meeting thinking: 'Oh, my God, the real show is them. There should be cameras in their house,' Johnston says. 'But they thought, They won't let us do that. Why would anybody in their right mind allow TV cameras in their house? [Someone said], 'Just ask them.' We did — reluctantly — and Sharon said yes, not even sure what that meant.'
It was an unexpected move for a celebrity family of that caliber.
'I don't even know why they wanted to do it,' Johnston says. 'It wasn't like today [how celebrities] want a show or use social media to promote whatever their brand is. Ozzy was already a celebrated rock star,' he says. 'There was no reason for them to do it. They just thought it was interesting and that their lives were interesting.'
Starting with the kernel of an idea, Johnston met with friends who produced the Real World to find out more about the magic formula. Then he started meeting with Sharon and the family, just 'myself and a camera, interviewing them, getting to know them — and allowing them to get to know me.'
He learned they were moving from a Malibu rental to Beverly Hills, 'And I thought: Oh, that would be a great place to start. We'll start shooting around the move and film for three weeks and see what happens. It was a test. 'We'll see if you like us. If this whole experiment is something that you hate.''
Nothing was off-limits
'We knew early on that we wanted to approach this like a documentary,' says Johnston, who produced all four seasons of the show, which ran from 2002 to 2005, and won an Emmy in 2002 for Outstanding Non-Fiction Program. 'We filmed pretty much 24/7. There was nothing scripted or planned. The best I could do was to ask Sharon: 'Do you know what you're doing this week? Are you traveling somewhere?' I would book a crew to follow that… If we tried to suggest anything to them, they would tell us, rightfully so, to f*** off.'
A control room was set up in the Osbournes' guest quarters, with the crew climbing in and out of the window so as not to disrupt the family. Johnston says that they weren't sure they had a hit until it aired — and their three-week stay at Chez Osbourne turned into three years.
What was the secret sauce?
'It was the family more than anything else,' Johnston says. 'Whatever they did in front of a camera and whatever they did off camera was the same. There wasn't this idea of playing for the camera. They were not trying to be funny, they just were. They dealt with everything with a sense of humor. And that's maybe that's an English thing too.'
Plus, 'They … didn't give a shit what people thought. That also typified Ozzy throughout his career. He had lots of ups and downs — biting the head off the bat and all these crazy things — but he never backed down [or said]: 'Oh, I didn't do that.' He would say: 'I'm not proud of that' and 'Yes, I was drunk when I did that.' But he always maintained a level of working-class honesty that was endearing."
While they were trying to make a comedy, real-life issues came up, including Sharon's colon cancer diagnosis in 2002 and Ozzy's ATV accident in 2003.
'It was very delicate,' Johnston says. 'We didn't want to exploit those things. We were with Ozzy in the U.K. when his quad bike [accident] happened. Thank God we were able to also call the ambulance… We would follow their lead. If they didn't want us to shoot something, we wouldn't, but I would say, 99% of the time that never happened. They always just sort of let us be, but we also had respect for them. We knew: All right, we've got this piece. They need a private moment, we're going to step out. With Sharon's cancer, we didn't want to encroach on that and her treatment, so we said we'd follow as much as they want us to. And Sharon wanted us to be there and tell the story of what she was going through. It was a delicate balance.'
The relationship between the family and the crew was a deep one.
'We were an extension of their family — that's how they treated us,' he says. 'That was part of the magic too. If Thanksgiving or Christmas rolled around and we were filming, Sharon would bring in caterers to make sure that the whole crew had dinner. This was out of her pocket [before the show took off]... She also flew the whole crew to Vegas. Ozzy was doing a show, we were going to film it, and she was like: 'Let's get everybody. I'm gonna charter this plane.''
The cops are coming
Of course, the show's greatest selling point was seeing Ozzy do anything — talking to the cats, working out, trying to have a heart-to-heart with Kelly and getting screamed at.
Johnston's favorite scene was 'Ozzy chasing the cat in the backyard, because of the context. He had fallen, his leg was in a cast, and he was laid up at home. Sharon was upstairs or out. It goes to Ozzy's heart. He loved the animals. The cat had gotten out, and he was convinced that a coyote was going to get it. Even though he had the broken leg, he was going to [save it] — but every time he inched within reach of the cat, it moved two inches, and he's like: 'God damn it,' and yelling for Sharon. We didn't want to step in, even though we wanted to step in.'
He recalls getting a call when Sharon threw the ham over the neighbor's wall, which stemmed from the neighbor's loud music.
'People, even friends or acquaintances, ask, 'How did you get her to throw the ham?' I'm like: 'Man, we didn't get her. That just happened.' … That night, a producer called, 'Greg, the cops are coming. What should I do?' … I said, 'Look, just keep rolling. You're not going to get arrested, but just film it.'
The episode also saw Ozzy, who was sleeping through much of the action, wake up and roll a log over the fence.
'It was a feeble attempt,' Johnston says. 'It barely goes over the wall. It's not like he's hucking giant pieces of wood at the neighbors.'
They used the footage, however, playing the log drop with a sound effect of glass breaking. Johnston's phone rang.
'God bless Ozzy,' he says. 'I never got calls from him about anything — because I didn't think he'd watch it — but he must have watched the cut of this episode or a promo. He said: 'Greg, you can't show that. They've got kids. I could have killed somebody.' I'm like, 'Ozzy, it's just a sound effect. You barely rolled the piece of wood over.' But he [insisted]: 'You can't show that.' He didn't want to hurt anybody.'
Why magic could never be replicated
The runaway success of the show was a lightning-in-a-bottle moment that was never replicated.
The Osbournes succeeded because MTV gave them the time, resources and creative freedom to truly document the family's real life.
'After The Osbournes, networks were like: 'Oh, we want something similar, but we want to know what's going to happen [ahead of time],'' Johnston says. 'That defeats the whole purpose of a great non-scripted show because real life is much better, funnier, interesting than anything a producer may come up with. And you want people to deal with their own life, their own consequences, to their own decisions. You don't want [a producer] making decisions for them.'
Johnston adds that most networks today probably lack the patience, imagination and budget to do that kind of 24/7 filming. Plus, 'there's no other family like the Osbournes, quite honestly; I've worked on thousands of shows, and there's just no family like them.'
At the center of it all, of course, was Ozzy. Asked what he'll remember most about the Osbourne patriarch, Johnston says his humility and humor. Despite his fame, Ozzy stayed grounded, often carrying a wad of $100 bills with a rubber band around them and handing them to people in need with zero fanfare. It was a habit rooted in his working-class upbringing and early years of having nothing.
Johnston also recalls never laughing 'as much or as hard as I did' with the star, who was effortlessly funny through his timing, reactions and offhand remarks.
'The world is a much less magical, funny and interesting place without Ozzy in it,' Johnston says. 'We were all lucky to be in his orbit.'
Solve the daily Crossword