When it debuted in March, “The Osbournes” became the most unexpected cultural phenomenon since “Who Wants to be a Millionaire.” With little advance hype, MTV’s reality sitcom about an aging, drug-ravaged rock star and his family shot to the top of the cable ratings week after week.
   The appeal was clear: they were just like any other American family, only with more cursing and fewer brain cells.
   But let’s be honest: You saw one episode, you saw ’em all.
   Each week, Ozzy slurred incomprehensibly, got frustrated by some basic task, and screamed “Sharon!”
   Each week, their dogs defecated on the floor. Each week, so much of the dialogue was bleeped out that you might as well have been listening to a radar detector going off.
   It all got a little old.
   And during the hiatus between last season and the inevitable second go ‘round, the Osbourne clan became dangerously overexposed. 
   At the MTV Movie Awards, daughter Kelly trotted out to sing her surprisingly solid cover of Madonna’s “Papa Don’t Preach.” Ozzy got invited to a dinner at the White House, where President Bush used him as a punch line.
   Dan Quayle, of all people, praised their family values, reminding people of all ages why they used to make fun of him. 
   Next month, the whole family hosts the American Music Awards, live on ABC, the very definition of a risky venture. (Have the ABC censors seen “The Osbournes”?)
   Last week’s second-season premiere immediately acknowledged how their world had changed. As fans gathered at the gates of the Osbourne household, screaming the name of the past-his-prime patriarch, Jack, the hopelessly dorky teenage son, ordered the sprinklers turned on them. 
   We got to accompany Ozzy to the White House press dinner, and saw how nervous he was about the affair. And we got to go backstage at the MTV Awards, where Jack caught a fleeting glimpse of his dream woman, Natalie Portman, and earnestly reported: “Great ass.”
   At the awards, we also saw another side of Jack: the sad, lonely adolescent upstaged by his big sis. At the show, he insisted over and over again to anyone who would listen that he was responsible for getting her signed with a record label. (Being Ozzy’s daughter and the star of an MTV show probably had a tad more to do with it.)
   Confronting their fame head-on turned out to be an effective way for MTV to deal with it. But the larger problem -- that “haven’t we seen this already?” sense -- remained.
   Here, real life (real real life, not the made-for-TV kind) shoved its way in. A few months ago, Sharon was diagnosed with colon cancer. So throughout the season premiere, before she’d been to the doctor at all, we knew what she didn’t. 
   At the end of the episode, she faced the camera and informed us that because everything was going so wonderfully, she was starting to worry, “like a typical Jewish mother,” that things couldn’t stay so good for long. Soon, she said, “something’s gonna come and knock us on the chin.”
   It was an eerie and heartbreaking moment, since we knew exactly what that something was, and how much worse it would be than whatever she was imagining.
   The second episode, which aired this week (new episodes air Tuesdays at 10:30 p.m., then rerun at odd times throughout the week), dwells on the family’s reaction to the news. 
   Kelly says it felt “like being stabbed in the chest” and Jack calls it a shock, but both deal with it awfully well -- or else MTV decided to show some class and not wallow in their misery. In any case, the kids seem to get on with their lives.
   Ozzy, on the other hand, is a mess (even more so than usual). Out on his Ozzfest tour, he begins drinking again, causing Sharon to send a poetry-spouting, yoga-practicing unintentional self-parody to help him cope. Luckily, Ozzy seems blissfully immune to this sort of hokum: The man reads a pretentious new age poem, and Ozzy stares vacantly until he’s done, then asks, “What the fuck is that all about?”
   So far “The Osbournes” is more moving than it was last season, and more entertaining. Sharon’s cancer has given the show drama and direction and depth; it’s almost as though it’s given it a much-needed plot, crass as that sounds. It’s also made us view them as something other than the cartoonish weirdoes they were last season. This year, they seem even more like a real family.

December 5, 2002© 2002 Media Life

-Dan Jewel is a senior editor at Biography Magazine in New York and a frequent contributor to Media Life.

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