• by Adam Buckman , Featured Columnist, August 5, 2020

Like spirits who refuse to leave a haunted house, the Osbournes are back on TV, this time on the ghost channel otherwise known as the Travel Channel.

Their new show is called “The Osbournes Want to Believe,” but it has nothing to do with religion.

Premiering this past Sunday on Travel, the show has members of the Osbourne family -- Sharon, Ozzy and son Jack, and possibly others -- seen at home watching clips of supernatural or unusual phenomena and then commenting on them.

To be specific, Jack, 34, presents his parents with these clips, and then Sharon, 67, and Ozzy, 71, decide whether the images are believable.

“From Bigfoot to UFOs, poltergeists, creepy dolls and unexplained apparitions, the couple will review -- and critique -- each caught-on-camera moment,” says a description posted on the Discovery Networks’ press site.

By the looks of the photo above, this new show appears to be a pandemic-era production. In other words, the participation of these Osbourne family members seems to require very little of them aside from sitting in their own home and talking to each other -- which they are likely doing already because of the COVID-19 lockdown.

For some reason, and possibly solely by coincidence, Ozzy himself is the subject of a show on another network next month -- A&E -- which has a two-hour “Biography” of the heavy-metal rocker, titled “The Nine Lives of Ozzy Osbourne,” scheduled for Sept. 7.

Although A&E rarely presents these “Biography” productions these days, at least the brand is connected with A&E. Some of us are old enough to remember the old “Biography” series that was once a staple of this network.

Where the Travel Channel is concerned, it is hard to form a connection between this new “Osbournes” Bigfoot show and a TV channel that purports to cover the subject of travel. 

In fact, a look at Travel Channel’s lineup of shows these days reveals that the pleasures of travel have been replaced by the terrors of travel.

Almost the entire program list is about ghosts and haunted places. On the channel’s press site, seven shows have the word “ghost” in their titles, and seven others have the word “haunted” or a variation of “haunt.”

One show is actually called “Destination Fear.” That doesn’t sound like a fun or interesting destination for a TV network devoted to travel.

The fact is, TV needs a real travel network, especially now when most of us either cannot or will not travel any farther than the nearest grocery store. 

Turning the Travel Channel into the Supernatural Channel seems like a prelude to doing away with the Travel Channel altogether. What’s next? “Haunted House Hunters” on HGTV?