What's up with those Osbournes?

By Ann Oldenburg
USA Today

OZZY "At that point, I totally realized how powerful that box you have in the corner is. TV is the most powerful thing that has ever been invented."

SHARON "I think we're not the same people" as before the show " ... Things are not the same at all."

KELLY "Growing up with your family is hard enough, let alone growing up in front of the world."

JACK Ozzy's 17-year-old son these days is just hanging out with kids his own age — in rehab.

'The Osbournes' 10:30 tonight MTV

For now, the tiny matriarch of the rock 'n' roll family that shot to ainstream fame in March 2002 with its cameras-always-rolling MTV show "The Osbournes" is contemplating all that's happened since then. In fact, she says, it makes her head spin. So right now, 7:30 at night, she needs a cup of tea.

Red-hot in its first season, the show broke ratings records for MTV and became weekly water-cooler fodder. Now, as its third season gets started — the second of 10 new episodes taped last winter and spring airs tonight at 10:30 on MTV — the mania has subsided. Second-season ratings were down more than 50 percent from the show's peak in May 2002, when nearly 8 million viewers tuned in, but still good by MTV standards.

Sharon sighs. "As I was leaving — just running upstairs to try and find my handbag, it's always the car keys or the handbag you can't find — I was thinking to myself, 'Is it worth all of this?' "

"It" is the fame and the money. "This" is the hard work and pain the family have publicly gone through.

"The Osbournes" became such a pop-culture darling that it moved Ozzy from bat-biting rock oddity to lovable, befuddled sitcom dad. The family was on magazine covers and talk shows and heralded as the new Ozzie and Harriet.

"I wanted to be a Beatle," Ozzy will say later. "Now I have a taste of what Beatlemania must have been like with the success of 'The Osbournes.' You become a prisoner to your own success."

What a prison: After the first season, Sharon negotiated for a $10 million deal with MTV for 20 more episodes (the first 10 started airing in April; the last 10 are now airing). Not to mention deals for bobble heads, backpacks and DVDs.

They were just last month placed at No. 3 on Britain's rock 'n' roll rich list, cited as having made $66 million (40 million pounds) last year, just behind Paul McCartney and the Rolling Stones.

But the toll on their souls is what Sharon, 50, and Ozzy, 54, are mulling right now.

"I think we're not the same people. I'd be fibbing if I said things were just the same. Things are not the same at all," says Sharon.

Jack's in a box

Most of all: Jack, who's 17. "I had no idea the effect the show would have on my kids because I had no idea if the show would be a little quirky show with a little cult following or anything. Jack wasn't prepared. Neither was I, but Jack was 15, Kelly, 16."

It would be easy to blame fame for Jack's turn to drugs and alcohol. But she can't. "After doing a lot of research and talking to an awful lot of people and being in the rehab with Jack and other kids whose parents aren't in the limelight at all — what do they blame?"

Maybe the rock lifestyle is to blame? "I don't blame the rock 'n' roll lifestyle," she says. "I blame me. You get caught up with the b.s., and I did, of, 'Oh, your mom's really cool. She's really easy-going.' I should have had more boundaries. I should have had more structure for Jack, and I didn't."

Now he's in a very structured place. "He's feeling right now that he's got no pressure on him at all. And he can be a kid. And he's with all kids his own age. He doesn't have to be anything but Jack."

Fame and misfortune

Just then, Ozzy arrives, shaking, stammering and mumbling. Underneath all the gold chains, long dark hair, big glasses and black T-shirt is the lovable character from the show.

"Sharon! There must have been 80 people at the house!"

"Ozzy, don't go there. My head is still spinning," she says.

Once settled in with his own pot of tea, he has a lot to say about his family's trip through phenom status.

"In America, these talent shows with young kids, there's a big danger in those shows where they make a kid a star. I liken it to a guy with a bow and arrow and he's the strongest man in the world and as high as you go, you gotta come back down. They're prepared to go up but not prepared to come back down."

He adds, "Sharon and I have been in show biz and it's been the best part of our lives." But nothing like "The Osbournes." "I was the Prince of Darkness nearly 35 years. Suddenly, I became Mr. Super Dad."

And everything was fine, until Sharon was diagnosed with colon cancer last summer.

"My highs were high, and my lows were low, and I honestly believe I had a nervous breakdown," Ozzy says. "I've not been the same since. One day I was meeting presidents and queens and royalty, the next minute I was worrying whether my wife would make it through the night."

Sharon says, "He literally couldn't get up and decide what pair of trousers to put on."

Then Ozzy tells a story.

"I was in Boston, and my brain was going to explode — certainly nothing else mattered, only: Is my wife going to make it? And because of the success of 'The Osbournes' TV show, everybody thinks they've got to come up to me and say the f-word. We use the f-word in our house all the time, and it's part of our language, but some people, they use it, and it just doesn't suit them.

"I was tired of being locked in my hotel room, because every time I went out, I got mobbed by everybody. I thought, 'I've gotta get some air.' I walk out of the hotel. This very conservative woman turns and does one of these double takes. She turns and says, 'My God — Ozzy (expletive) Osbourne.'

"Have you ever been in this situation where you're embarrassed for somebody else? She said, 'What on earth are you doing in Boston?'

I said I'm doing a show. She said, 'What kind of a show?' I said a rock 'n' roll show. And she said, 'Oh, you do that, as well?'

"At that point, I totally realized how powerful that box you have in the corner is. TV is the most powerful thing that has ever been invented."

Sharon has been given a clean bill of health, and Ozzy says he's almost back to normal. "I'm not 100 percent, but I'm 70 percent better. I have good days, and I have bad days."

But they're all sober days, he says. "What's helped me immensely is a physical trainer. I run and exercise."

Material's girl

As it's nearing 8:15 p.m., Kelly, 18, bops in, blonde hair sticking out from under a black bowler hat, and dressed all in black. Her parents perk up. The girl we've seen throw up, cry, fight with her brother and be criticized for her weight is in a hurry. So, Kelly. Has it been good or bad?

"There's good and bad to everything," she says, looking rock chic but sounding like Miss America. "You have to take the good with the bad."

Kelly's first album, "Shut Up," was a modest success. Then she was dropped by her record label. She's still stinging from that.

So if you had it to do over again, would you do it the same way? "Yeah, because I believe when you make mistakes, it makes you a better person," she says.

A bit petulant, she urges her parents to leave for dinner or they're "going to be late!" as she constantly checks her BlackBerry. (Later her publicist will say she was messaging Kelly from across the room telling her to calm down and cooperate with the interview.)

Kelly settles into a sofa for a moment.

Says Ozzy: "You say there may be good and bad, but it beats being in a traffic jam on the 405 at 7 o'clock in the morning working a job you hate, for a person you hate. I'm not complaining. I've got not one complaint. We're blessed. It could have been a lot worse. I could have been a delivery guy."

Sharon: "I don't think so. You would have gotten the wrong delivery or taken them home." Everyone laughs.

Chewing the scenery

Back to Kelly and fame: "I think it made me realize how — I don't know how to put this without sounding ungrateful — but how naive people are. How everything you see is not the way it really is."

Says Ozzy: "My son said to me one day, 'Dad, do you think they're laughing with you or at you?' I said, 'Son, if they're laughing with me or at me, as long as they're laughing, I'm doing my job.' "

But Kelly couldn't laugh it all off so easily.

"I'm 18 years old," she says. "My father has lived a great portion of his life in having to do this stuff. I haven't. Sometimes I find it very hard. I am just a kid, you know? Growing up with your family is hard enough, let alone growing up in front of the world. The difference between me and everyone else is I get criticized for it and no one else does."

Then she softens, admitting it hasn't all been boo-hoo awful. "It's enabled me to have most of my dreams come true. It's enabled me to do music, which I love."

And acting. She'll try, but cut her losses quickly if it doesn't work.

"My thought is try it once and if you suck at it, at least you know."

Right now there is so much going on they're not thinking of allowing cameras in for a new set of shows.

And would we want them to? Average ratings for the second season were down to 4.4 million viewers from 5.3 million the first season. Are they cooling off?

"I think it's proven to be more wildly successful and sustainable than anyone imagined," says Joe Levy, music editor for Rolling Stone. "Can they sustain it for nine years like 'Friends'? If NBC ran 'Friends' as much as MTV runs 'The Osbournes,' we'd all be tired of that."

MTV isn't ready to see them go. Brian Graden, programming chief, says, "We'll do as many more (new shows) as they're willing to do."

Sharon isn't so sure. "I honestly don't know. It's not up to me. It's a group decision."

They'll have to decide by Christmas. Right now that feels like a long time.