If there is one subject that doesn’t need to be hyped, sentimentalized or overdramatized, it’s someone’s reunion with a long-lost relative. The producers of “Find My Family” think otherwise.

This short-run reality series, premiering tonight on ABC at 9:30 p.m., helps adoptees and their biological parents locate each other, then sets up a meeting. Naturally, tears flow onscreen, but viewers will likely remain relatively unmoved.

One reason is that TV has been reuniting family members on screen ever since “This Is Your Life” back in the 1950s. The premise is a staple of TV newsmagazines and daytime talk shows, as well as a current series on We called “The Locator.”

And back in 2005, Fox aired one episode of the notorious reality-competition series “Who’s Your Daddy?” in which an attractive woman (who, it was later learned, had appeared in softcore movies) chose among 25 men claiming to be her biological father.

Perhaps aware that the material is familiar, the producers of “Find My Family” keep putting their thumbs on the emotional scale. The show’s host, Tim Green, tells us that he himself was adopted and reunited as an adult with his biological parents. And many of the people involved in the production of the show, he says, were also adopted.

When Green talks to the family members in the two stories that ABC made available for review (only one of which is told in tonight’s premiere), he makes sure to tell them his own story, and he tears up.

“I think every adopted person’s dream is to be found,” he tells the two biological parents in the premiere. That statement feels addressed more to viewers who are worried that some of these stories might turn out badly, or who are old-fashioned and simply think that such intensely personal moments should be private.

Meeting the couple’s biological daughter, the cohost of the show, Lisa Joyner, shares that she was adopted herself, and she also tears up.

In the second story, a grown adoptee says that he is particularly interested in learning about his background because his soldier son is about to be sent to Afghanistan and he wants the Army doctors to know his family’s medical history. Again, the producers are adding a dose of basically irrelevant drama to an already interesting situation: It would seem that in combat one would tend to be less worried about a genetic condition.

The actual reunions are staged at a picturesque hilltop location beneath what Green calls “our family tree.” In both of the two cases in the preview screener, there are very good reasons not to have made the participants travel all the way there, but visuals seem to trump those concerns.

All of these distractions reduce our emotional involvement with the participants, reminding us that we’re not watching reality but reality TV. If we were more emotionally engaged, we wouldn’t be wondering why certain pertinent details about the participants were left out or glossed over, or, more important, whether the participants would actually continue to treat each other like family after the reunions.

A feel-good show should leave you less cynical, not more.