Exraordinarily Ordinary

Exraordinarily Ordinary

The Osbournes as “An American Family”Derek Kompare

The Osbournes as “An American Family”Derek Kompare

BY: ANTHONY MENZA & MICHELLE SORIANOBY: ANTHONY MENZA & MICHELLE SORIANO

March 5, 2002- Premiere of The

Osbournes

By its fifth episode, it was MTV’s all

time highest rated regular television

series

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=17j8jryYK8o

In 1973, a PBS documentary An American Family followed the lives of the Loud family

Both shows followed the format of a “Reality Family” and both were seen as unique and fresh

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MJ-yofcaPMk

Differences between the two

• In the 1970’s An American Family was seen as a social experiment rather than entertainment. The Loud Family was seen by critics as symbols of the ultimate fallout of the 1960’s lifestyle

• The Osbournes was seen as an innovation of television comedy. They were celebrated for their hip parenting and “let-it-all-hang-out” media savvy

Genre and Family

• Both The Osbournes and An American Family were premised on an awareness of the categories of genre and family, and the role each member of the family played

• They maintain the “traditional family” stereotype (mom, dad, brother, sister, pet) and add a unique twist

Genre and Family

• It is important for an on-screen family to have a lifestyle that viewers would want to emulate

• The normative parameters of genre and family affected the conception, production, promotion, and reception of both An American Family and The Osbournes

• Functional families such as The Cleavers (Leave it to Beaver), The Brady’s (The Brady Bunch) and The Simpsons (The Simpsons) were seen as the normal “television family”, which means fictional events and storyline’s must be introduced or influenced in the reality “television family” in order to match viewers predisposition of a television family

“Documentary and Reality”

• Both An American Family and The Osbournes have the same intent; to capture REALITY, as opposed to NORMALITY

• The term “documentary” should not be used to describe these shows, but the root word, “document”

• “While documentary has traditionally claimed to produce truth about its subjects, documentation instead displays examples of actuality...”

The Display of Ignominious Bodies

• While An American Family in the 1970’s had an aim to reveal hidden truths behind the family’s lifestyle, The Osbournes in the 2000’s playfully depicted the ordinary things that the extraordinary subjects do on a day-to-day basis

The First Reality Sitcom

• MTV always ventured to keep its content fresh and hip, and The Osbournes was the first show to push the envelope in terms of content limits, which appealed to younger audiences, and continues to today with shows such as Teen Mom, Buckwild, Jersey Shore, or even Jackass.

• This broadening of the content limit paved the way for all of entertainment today

CONCLUSION: “We Argue, but at the End of

the Day, We Love Eachother

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nF7ejMam3s8

• While the series’ portray actuality, it is important for the audience to subconsciously realize that the characters they see on these programs are just that: CHARACTERS

• They do so by doing other media appearances, such as talk shows, magazine articles, and radio interviews, acting somewhat unlike their on-screen persona, which is more towards the average side of things

• In the instance of The Osbournes, Ozzy and Sharon’s eldest daughter Aimee never makes an appearance, in an attempt to maintain her privacy

• “While An American Family and The Osbournes are certainly unique television series’, they both had to function under particular normative categories of genre and family in order to be comprehensible, let alone successful. The fact that they functioned in radically different ways indicates how the content of these terms- in particular, the effective meaning of television “reality”- has shifted considerably over three decades. Thus, the key question for reality television, now and for the foreseeable future, is not whether its reality is produced but how it is articulated with existing codes and expectations.”