Stick out your tongue, Gene; do something to liven things up

The A&E; reality show “Gene Simmons Family Jewels” puts the function back in fun. It’s a play date with a rocker’s family, the cameras rolling on their daily life, but it never exhibits much sense of play.

Once you meet the brood here -- Dad Gene, the KISS rock god, mom Shannon Tweed, the ex-soft-core queen, and their children, 17-year-old Nick and 14-year-old Sophie -- it dawns on you that there’s quite possibly nothing much to them, “reality”-wise.

They try to act miscreant, but that’s the problem: They’re acting. It remains true that the best stars for this kind of reality show -- Whitney Houston of Bravo’s “Being Bobby Brown,” Flavor Flav and Brigitte Nielsen of VH1’s “Flavor of Love,” Ozzy and Sharon of MTV’s “The Osbournes” -- are damaged folks, chemically or otherwise. They are spectacles of performance and pathology who’ve broken from reality to create a more entertaining reality, so that we might be entertained.

In the press material for “Family Jewels,” A&E; promises that each episode will “reveal another layer of Gene’s private self, a side that he has kept hidden until now, and shows how the most nontraditional, traditional family in America manages to make it work under the strangest of circumstances.”

You mean that time Gene had to do house chores ‘cause it was Shannon’s birthday, and so while Shannon and Sophie went shopping for rings, Gene had to clean the pool? Yeah, I feared for the family’s sanity.

Simmons is an ardent self-promoter and egotist, the man of 4,600 conquests, etc., etc. This is his second go-round at reality TV, after the VH1 show “Gene Simmons’ Rock School.” In that one, Simmons was placed in an English boarding school, where he did a “Dead Poets Society” routine, helping proper kids find their inner hellion. At least he had something to do. He arrived at the boarding school not just with a limo but also with a premise.

In “Family Jewels,” Simmons is a fish in his own water, puttering around his house, from the office to the kitchen and back again. As for Shannon, you wouldn’t be able to pick her out of a lineup of well-maintained Beverly Hills moms. She’s either on mood stabilizers or just happens to be an incredibly amiable person.

Maybe hints of her Cinemax past could spice up the show. Get me rewrite; oh wait, these shows aren’t supposed to have actual writers. As it plays, the whole show’s about as risk-taking and eventful as a walk down the hall in a pair of KISS bedroom slippers.

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‘Gene Simmons Family Jewels’

Where: A&E;

When: 10 and 10:30 Mondays