Daze of Their Lives

Wednesday November 27, 2002 12:00 PM EST

Stepping into the living room of her four-bedroom Beverly Hills mansion, Sharon Osbourne appears far more delicate than she did in the first season of MTV's The Osbournes. Four months of chemotherapy have taken a toll: Her weight has dwindled by 22 lbs. Her 5'2" frame is swallowed up in her white robe. "I don't know what that stuff is they put inside you," she says as she settles down on a velvet sofa with a Pomeranian named Minnie and her husband, heavy-metal legend Ozzy Osbourne, "but it shrinks you as well."

"Bag of bones," says Ozzy.

In stomps Jack, beet-red angry from his latest skirmish with sister Kelly. "Mom," he barks, "Kelly's acting up. She punched me in the b----. I'm not gonna put up with it if she keeps doing this."

Ozzy, as is his way, takes in the scene with a look of distracted bewilderment, like someone trying to follow the flight of an invisible hummingbird. But Sharon gets up to settle the matter. "Can you give me five minutes?" she asks a visitor before leaving with Jack.

Nice to know that, even coming to grips with a potentially fatal illness, TV's most eccentric family remains true to its coarse, disorderly, crazy self. It's been eight months since The Osbournes debuted, scoring MTV's best ratings ever and transforming an aging heavy-metal star and his family into a sort of real-life distillation of the Addamses, the Simpsons and the Beverly Hillbillies. Season 2 premiered Nov. 26, and not much seems different. Ozzy, 53, still can't figure out how to work the remote. Sharon, 50, is again butting heads with neighbors. Last season she flung a ham over a fence when the folks next door drove her crazy with their "Kumbaya" sing-alongs. The new trouble zone, she says, is the tennis courts of another set of neighbors. "It's like living next to McEnroe all day, all night," Sharon says.

Meanwhile Jack, 17, and Kelly, 18, continue their tooth-and-nail battles ("Kelly is a ticking time bomb of fury," says Jack), the yapping dogs (now numbering nine) remain indifferently housebroken, and oldest daughter Aimee, 19, an aspiring singer, continues to be AWOL, at least on-camera. She moved to a nearby apartment last fall to avoid the Osbourne family circus. "My sister has this thing," says Kelly. "She wants everyone to think she's perfect."