What's Claim to Fame About?

A dozen otherwise un-famous relatives of celebrities are gathered to guess each other's secret family connections — and to keep their own celebrity relatives from being found out — in an elimination-style reality competition.

Who's involved?

• Kevin and Frankie Jonas, hosts. Yes, it's entirely intentional that the least glamorous of the Jonas Brothers and his brother, the so-called "bonus Jonas" who wasn't even in the group to begin with, host this show about the unknown relatives of famous people.
• Chris Coelen and Eric Detwiler, executive producers. The producing pair previously came together to bring us the trashy reality dating series Love Is Blind. Before that, they were longtime veterans of the Married at First Sight franchise.

Why (and to whom) do we recommend it?

The dissolution of traditional TV "seasons" has meant we don't have nearly as many summer shows in the way we used to — those low-stakes series that were good for a three-month fling but usually don't require a longer commitment. ABC continues to buck this trend with its summer fun and games programming block that's managed a pretty good batting average when it comes to shows that strike the perfect balance of silly and addictive. Premiering just a day after escapist delight The Final Straw, comes Claim to Fame, another series that seems fairly dumb at first glance but is actually a ton of fun and lets the audience play along with its contestants in a way that encourages texting with your friends as you watch.

Coelen, Detwiler, and the show's other producers make a few smart decisions from the start, beginning with the fact that the audience is only made privy to the secret celebrity relatives of a couple of the show's contestants. The first task for the gathered celeb-adjacents is to reveal a little something about themselves in "two truths and a lie" style (they're also allowed a second lie if they want to go by a different name than their own). Two of the contestants reveal their famous relative to the home audience during this segment, but we're left to play along with the rest as they give up bits and pieces of intel, such as which field of entertainment their relative is in and which awards they've won. With a bit of moderate Googling, viewers will probably crack the code on almost all of them, but it's fun to play along and guess, say, which Hall of Fame NFL quarterback is Brittany's dad or which country music star is Logan's cousin.

Clues abound, both from the information the players glean from one another to the giant clue wall which is styled like a Picasso assemblage of tchotchkes that are meant to suggest the celebrity relatives' identities (does the shark mean someone's related to Steven Spielberg, the director of Jaws??). It's like a game of Clue crossed with Guess Who crossed with the thrill you got when you realized the boring one on The Gilded Age was Meryl Streep's daughter.

While we play along at home, the contestants take notes and try to parse the truth out from the lies. Sometimes genetics is the great betrayer, as at least a couple people look remarkably like their famous siblings. This puts them in danger, as each episode ends with a "Guess Off" where one person voted on by the group must correctly guess another contestant's secret relative or be sent home.

So what happens if you're a dead ringer for a certain Olympic athlete? That's where the gamesmanship comes in, and the first episode gives a good window into the kind of social strategy that could make this show satisfying on the level of a Big Brother. The premiere also ends with a legitimately shocking revelation that will not be spoiled here but which adds an extra jolt of excitement to an already promising debut.

It should be said, also, that Kevin and Frankie Jonas make for quite the charming pair of co-hosts, clearing a low bar of expectation with their banter and a self-awareness of their place in the celebrity ecosystem. Look out, Julie Chen-Moonves: the Bonus Jonas is coming for your crown.

Pairs well with

• The Hustler (Amazon Freevee), was more of a game show than an ongoing reality series, but it still required contestants to read each other and the secrets they were hiding (and let the home audience play along).
• Whodunnit (ABC.com), a 2013 summer reality series that was beloved by its small but fervent audience who got to play along with a murder-mystery game carried out among a group of mystery-solving contestants.
• The Mole (Netflix), reality TV's great, too-smart-to-be-broadly-popular series which, like Claim to Fame, required its contestants to keep little notebooks full of suspicions about the other contestants.