OZZIE UPDATE :

The Osbournes Turn America Into the Land of Oz (Andrew Ferguson, 5/14/02, Bloomberg)

Like most entertainments beloved of Baby Boomers, 'The Osbournes' pretends to challenge its audience while affirming the prejudices that its audience holds most dear. Leave aside the ancient 'Ozzie and Harriet.' A more instructive comparison is with a hugely popular documentary series, 'An American Family,' which aired in 1973 on PBS, in the backwash of the 1960s counterculture.

The show was a precise reversal of Ozzy's. It too depicted the day-to-day home life of a real family, the Louds, who by all outward appearances lived the American dream: prosperous, attractive, well-dressed, decorous -- what we used to call normal.

As the series unfolded, however, America watched this typical family dissolve in divorce, drugs and sexual dysfunction. The moral of the story was unmistakably countercultural: Bourgeois 'normality' was a sham, a flimsy cover for quiet desperation.

Thirty years later, 'The Osbournes' delivers the same countercultural message, from the opposite direction. Polite behavior, decorous speech, personal tidiness are all inessential trappings of bourgeois convention.

Having released themselves from such old-fashioned constraints, the Osbournes touch depths of familial harmony that more conventional families like the Louds could only pretend to. The Louds were 'normal' and suffered terribly. The Osbournes are 'abnormal' and live happily. So what's the point of being 'normal'?

That countercultural message was untrue in 1973 and it's untrue today. The old-fashioned constraints weren't signs of hypocrisy; they were markers of civilization, enshrining the best tendencies of human behavior and ennobling the common life.

Should have known that the most underrated columnist in America would have dealt with the bat-biter in dispositive fashion. Posted by Orrin Judd at June 4, 2002 7:32 AM