F You, MTV

I never watched The Osbournes.

Not one episode.

Recently, some clips.

That probably makes me an unlikely person to write about what MTV did to Ozzy Osbourne. But maybe it makes me exactly the right person.

Because I met Ozzy backwards.

I didn't discover him through reality television. I didn't spend the early 2000s watching him shuffle through his house while subtitles translated his mumbling, cameras waited for another confused moment, and America laughed.

When I was 11 Bark at the Moon came out and Ozzy looked like a werewolf and scared me. In fact, for most of my life, I avoided Ozzy Osbourne entirely.

Then, decades later, I finally listened.

And I discovered an intelligent, funny, sensitive, remarkably self-aware man underneath a public image that had been constructed around him for years. He was much more intelligent than what The Osbournes show portrayed him.

That's when the old clips from The Osbournes started looking very different to me.

And I began wondering:

What the fuck did MTV do to Ozzy Osbourne?

Reality Television Needed a Character

Reality television has always had a dirty little secret.

Reality isn't enough.

Hours and hours of footage have to become twenty-something minutes of television. Editors decide what stays. Producers decide which storylines matter. Music tells us when something is funny. Reaction shots tell us whom to laugh at.

And eventually a human being becomes a character.

On The Osbournes, Ozzy's character was irresistible television: the Prince of Darkness reduced to a bewildered father wandering around his own mansion.

The contrast was the joke.

This was Ozzy f-ing Osbourne — Black Sabbath, bats, heavy metal, decades of supposed depravity — standing in a kitchen looking confused by some ordinary piece of modern life.

America loved it.

MTV had struck gold.

But there was another Ozzy there, too.

Even in the clips I've seen, I can see him and that he was aware.

Listen when Ozzy actually gets the chance to finish a thought.

There is intelligence there. There is extraordinary comic timing. There is self-awareness. There is vulnerability. There is a man who spent decades observing the insanity of fame from inside the machine.

Most importantly, there is a man who knows perfectly well how absurd the entire thing is.

That Ozzy isn't nearly as convenient if the character you're selling is "lovable incoherent rock star."

The Mumbling Became the Man

This is the part that bothers me.

Ozzy's difficulty speaking became entertainment.

His physical mannerisms became entertainment.

His confusion became entertainment.

His history with addiction became part of the scenery.

Eventually millions of people who had never sat down and listened to Ozzy Osbourne speak thoughtfully knew him primarily as the guy who shuffled around the house and muttered.

Think about how powerful that is.

MTV didn't invent Ozzy's difficulties. They didn't invent his eccentricities, his addictions or his very real chaos.

But television gets to choose what it magnifies.

And The Osbournes magnified certain parts of Ozzy until, for an entire generation of viewers, those parts practically became the whole man.

That's where funny starts becoming cruel.

Gen X Should Recognize This Trick

I'm Gen X.

We grew up with MTV.

MTV didn't just show us culture. For a while, MTV practically decided what culture was.

It told us what was cool, what was ridiculous, who mattered and who had become a punchline.

And we swallowed a hell of a lot of it because there wasn't an algorithm offering seventeen competing versions of somebody's story. There was the television in the living room.

If MTV framed something as funny, we laughed.

Looking backward now, I'm uncomfortable with some of the things television taught us to laugh at.

Ozzy is one of them.

Because the joke depended upon forgetting something rather important:

The supposedly confused man stumbling around that house was one of the architects of heavy metal. A profound legend.

Before reality television existed, Ozzy Osbourne and Black Sabbath helped create a musical language that musicians are still speaking more than half a century later.

You don't accidentally do that.

You don't survive that career, reinvent yourself as a solo artist, work with extraordinary musicians, interpret songs, understand audiences and remain culturally relevant across generations because you're stupid.

Ozzy was never stupid. EVER.

Eccentric? Obviously.

Damaged? At times.

Addicted? He talked openly about it.

Confusing? Certainly.

But stupid?

F*CK off.

I Could See Him Anyway

That's the strange thing.

MTV's portrayal didn't completely work on me.

Maybe because I came to Ozzy without having watched the series when it originally aired. By the time I saw those famous clips, I had already heard him elsewhere.

I had listened to interviews.

I had listened to the music.

I had listened to what he actually said when somebody gave him enough time to say it.

And underneath the mumbling and the pauses, I heard a man thinking.

Sometimes deeply.

Sometimes hilariously.

Sometimes painfully.

Ozzy possessed something reality television can't manufacture: emotional intelligence.

He understood fear.

He understood loneliness.

He understood addiction.

He understood being dismissed.

And he understood the strange bargain between performer and audience perhaps better than most people who ever became famous.

The more I discovered about him, the less funny that old caricature became. In fact? It made my heart physically ache for him.

Maybe We Owe Him an Apology

I'm not suggesting Ozzy was an unwilling prisoner every second The Osbournes was being filmed. He participated in the show. His family participated. It changed television and made the Osbournes enormously famous to an entirely new audience.

Life is complicated.

That's exactly why I don't want to replace one simplistic story with another one.

But participation doesn't mean a person controls how hundreds of hours of footage are edited into a television character.

And success doesn't mean exploitation can't happen at the same time.

Both things can be true.

The Osbournes could have been groundbreaking, hilarious television.

And the version of Ozzy it sold to the world could still have been unfair.

Maybe that's the conversation worth having now.

Not whether we were terrible people for laughing twenty-five years ago.

We laughed because television told us where the joke was.

The better question is whether we're capable of looking again.

I finally did.

And I found someone very different from the man I'd been taught to expect.

So, MTV — From One Gen Xer

Thanks for the music videos.

Thanks for Headbangers Ball.

Thanks for all those glorious years when three letters actually meant music television.

But when it comes to Ozzy Osbourne?

F you a little bit.

Because somewhere underneath the editing, the subtitles, the stumbling, the bleeping and the perfectly selected moments of confusion was John Michael Osbourne — a working-class kid from Aston who helped change music forever.

A man far more intelligent than the character television made from him.

A man who was frequently in on the joke.

And sometimes, I suspect, was the joke.

There's a difference.

It took me more than forty years to finally meet Ozzy Osbourne through his music.

When I did, I realized something MTV never managed to put into a neat little reality-TV package:

The Prince of Darkness wasn't frightening.

He was profoundly human.

And maybe that was the most interesting thing about him all along.