Television: Back in the Land of Ozz

There is famous, and there is famous. When the Osbournes opened their home to MTV’s cameras last year, they were niche-rock-star famous. Today they are dinner-with-the-President famous, interview-with-Barbara-Walters famous, hit-video-on-Total Request Live famous. So things have changed on the second season of The Osbournes (Tuesdays, 10:30 p.m. E.T., beginning Nov. 26). Yes, everyone still swears a lot. Ozzy still can’t figure out the TV remote. And the dogs still soil the carpet, although if they’re smart, their agent has now negotiated a per-poop bonus in their contracts. But the series is no longer about the Osbournes, heavy-metal Munsters. It’s about the Osbournes, stars of The Osbournes.

If watching the family become mainstream media stars is not as weirdly fun as the first season was, it’s intriguing in its own way. MTV has never been shy about embracing the postmodern paradoxes of reality programming–The Real World no longer even pretends to be about real life, and millions of viewers couldn’t care less–so The Osbournes takes the fame issue straight on. We catch up with Ozzy and wife manager Sharon primping for the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, the annual fete during which the two nerdiest groups of celebrities–politicians and journalists–surround themselves with actual stars to bask in the reflected cool. As George W. Bush gives Ozzy a shout-out from the podium and the Prince of Darkness leads the room in applause for himself, you hope that someone had the good sense to take away William Bennett’s steak knife.

Meanwhile, youngest daughter Kelly, glammed up and ready to debut her cover of Madonna’s Papa Don’t Preach at the MTV Movie Awards, is starting a music career. Like any good metal princess turned teen idol, Kelly is showily ambivalent, wearing a jacket that says POP STARS KISS MY BIG FAT A__, even though on her trendy, punk-lite new single, Shut Up, she sounds like Belinda Carlisle for the 21st century. Jack, the mellower Osbourne sib, thinks sis is getting too big for her crucifixes. During an argument, Kelly tells him, “I hope someone beats you up.” He snaps back, “I hope your album fails.” Sharon is aghast–at Jack. In this family, you can tell somebody to blank themselves in the blank with a blankety-blank, but jinx their Soundscan numbers, and you’ve crossed a line.

In the middle of the family’s boom time intrudes the realest thing imaginable: in Episode 2, Sharon is diagnosed with colon cancer. Ozzy, on tour and distraught, begins self-medicating with prescription drugs and drinking heavily. “She’s the whole world to me,” he tells the camera in a rare serious moment, and it’s no exaggeration: you can’t imagine the gentle, trembly rocker managing five seconds without her support. Sharon invites MTV into her chemo sessions and her sickroom with typical brazenness (“Sharon, how’s your a__hole today?” she jokes. “Oh, much better, thank you!”). Yet you get a stronger feeling than last season that the cameras are on a leash. Nobody cries–though the family mentioned plenty of tearful moments in their recent sit-down with Walters–and MTV stresses that the cancer episode “does not signify a change in tone for the season.”

Well, cancer does signify a change in tone for a family’s life. (The illness also arises when family friend Robert Marcato, 18, moves in with the Osbournes after his mother dies of cancer.) If future episodes ignore it, they may just seem cynically feel-good. And if anyone can work cancer into a reality sitcom, it is The Osbournes, which won us over by flouting convention, and MTV, which wins viewers over by telling them that they and their icons are part of the same extended family. MTV is full of series whose premise is giving ordinary people the key to Celebville (Tough Enough, Making the Band). The Osbournes has managed to do the same thing with people who lived there to begin with. It took a somewhat famous clan and made them wildly famous, and yet to us, they’re the nice folks down the street who hit the lottery. After all, we knew them back when they were merely somebodies.