“Hooking Up:” Get “Enmeshed In The Emotions” Of ABC’s New Documentary

Tonight at 9pm on ABC: The first installment of “Hooking Up,” a five-part ABC News documentary that follows “the mostly grim world of Internet romance through the perspective of 11 New York women.”

“People think that news can’t be entertaining, that it has to be earnest and like taking castor oil,” Terence Wrong, the show’s executive producer, says, obviously disagreeing with that assumption.

The Observer’s Rebecca Dana calls it says the series is “not traditional news–it’s more…realistic.” According to Wrong, the goal was “to lose the objectivity of the ubiquitous voice, to really be enmeshed in the emotions, in the turmoil and drama as it happened.”

As veteran filmmaker Paul Sparrow says, reality shows helped decimate news mags, so now “news shows are starting to try to fight back.” The Observer write-up is a must-read…