Ozzy Osbourne Says Reality TV Shows Today Are “Not the Real, Real Reality”

Ozzy Osbourne said reality television today is very different than it was when his family’s MTV series The Osbournes was on the air.

In an interview with Spin magazine, published online Tuesday, the Black Sabbath frontman said that “what they call reality TV now is really not reality.”

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“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, which ran for four seasons from 2002 to 2005, was a part of the initial wave that launched the reality TV boom of the 21st century, including Keeping Up With the Kardashians and The Real Housewives franchise. The show followed the life of Osbourne, his wife Sharon and two of their children, Kelly and Jack.

“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.”

The musician said his family went about their show a certain way and were only going to keep doing the reality series if their family was all in, and it felt right.

“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.”

The Osbournes won an Emmy in 2002 for outstanding reality program.

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