Oh, this looks so bad. So very, very, very bad. Like, “Rosie Live” bad.
The idea of giving the Osbournes their own comedy-variety show is not in and of itself a bad idea. When I first heard about “Osbournes: Reloaded,” I immediately had thoughts of my favorite cheesy, kitschy variety shows from the ’70s – see the collected works of Sonny & Cher, Donny & Marie, and, of course, “The Brady Bunch Hour” – and could totally imagine Ozzy, Sharon, Jack, and Kelly either turning the genre on its head or totally and utterly camping it up. Either way, I was actually kind of excited to see what might evolve out of this concept. But when they showed us clips from the show, I was horrified to see a mixture of in-studio shenanigans with audience members (they blindfold a guy, tell him he’s going to kiss the beautiful girl in front of him, then switch her out with a wrinkled old woman) and hidden-camera hijinks (the Osbournes working at a fast-food drive-thru). There was a sketch with little kids playing Sharon and Ozzy (cue the cursing 5-year-old), plus a brief clip of the Osbournes trying to guess who their mystery special guest for the week was. The one lone humorous concept came from a bit called “The Osbournes Meet The Osbournes,” where the gang goes around the country to meet other families who share their last name, but even that seems like it would get old really quickly.
More disappointing than this footage, however, was the fact that, as a family unit, the Osbournes remain just as entertaining and charismatic as they were in the days of their then-groundbreaking MTV reality series.
What a waste. What a bloody waste.
And, yet, I guess it was too hopeful to expect something like that from the Osbournes in the first place, particularly when you could see Kelly bristle at the mere mention of the term “variety show.”
“See, that frightens us,” she said. “The way that we see that it’s a variety show is that there’s a variety of different things. And with no disrespect to other variety shows from the past because, I mean, they made the TV of today. It’s just not what we do. We’re not going to be Sonny-and-Chering it.”
