'Hooking Up' is sex in the city for real

A new documentary television series "Hooking Up" follows 11 New York women navigating the pitfalls of online dating in a show that one reviewer calls "hard-core voyeurism."
 

Executive producer Terence Wrong says "Hooking Up" is no reality show. He likens it to his previous fly-on-the-wall shows about the New York Police Department and a hospital.

"You shouldn't have to be somber and earnest and make a decided effort not to be entertaining in order to be a legitimate news documentary," Wrong said in New York.

The women in "Hooking Up" are attractive professionals aged between 26 and 38.

Maryam, a half-Iraqi half-Iranian photographer, says she is looking for "marriage material" but ends up attracted to a man whose picture has him lying shirtless on leopard-print sheets.

ABC, owned by The Walt Disney Co., contacted major dating Web sites to post ads inviting women to participate in the series, and more than 150 were interviewed. They had to agree to date only men they meet online, and to go out on dates at least once or twice a week.

The men, who were warned in advance their dates would be filmed, are as frank as the women. One man notes that a prospective date only posted pictures showing her from the waist up: "She may be hiding what's called junk in the trunk."

The show airs at 9 p.m. and while it contains quite open discussion of sex and dating, the cameras melt away if there is any prospect of more than a kiss or a cuddle.

Daily newspaper Newsday said the show was "hardly perfect" but it was hard not to keep watching. "Mostly, it's hard-core voyeurism," reviewer Verne Gay wrote.

After shooting 1,200 hours of footage over 10 months, Wrong's conclusion is online dating is probably only effective for "chronically shy" people. For the rest, high expectations are often not met when people meet in the flesh.

"Often on the Internet people are deceitful," Wrong said.

"When you show up at a date you could be meeting an ax murderer or a Nobel Prize winner."

With online dating so popular, all manner of niche sites have sprung up.

One such site is beautifulpeople.net, which describes itself as solely for the "aesthetically beautiful."

The site has been up in Britain since April and goes live in the United States this month. Existing members vet new applicants, rating their pictures and profiles. The British site currently has 4,377 members and 17,933 applicants.

Carolina Trower, a 38-year-old English member, compares it to going to a ritzy bar rather than a dingy pub full of "dirty old men."

"We don't want any low standards, any dodgy people, anybody who's going to be offensive," she said.

But the new technology has not made obsolete old-fashioned matchmakers, especially for those with cash to burn.

Samantha Daniels, who runs high-end matchmaker Samantha's Table, says online dating is too much work for some.

Daniels, author of "Matchbook: the Diary of a Modern Day Matchmaker" and who boasts she has arranged some 50 marriages, does all the vetting, picks dates from her own friends and acquaintances and interviews them on behalf of the client.

"My clients are very, very busy with work so the last thing they want to do is go on a date where there's no chance of it working," Daniels said.

But personal service comes at a price.

"It's $400 (228 pounds) for a consultation which is to meet with me face to face and talk about who they're looking for, and the package starts at $10,000," she said.

--Reuters