There isn’t a week that goes by that I don’t give at least a moment or two’s thoughts to one of the landmark projects in the history of TV and film, the “7 Up” series. That’s the power of film to burrow into your brain and influence your thinking.

A former high school classmate is forever Facebook posting vintage photos from the hometown newspapers of the Southern town where I grew up. I glance at these wholly-segregated accounts of life in that rural county and can’t help but see the same entitled surnames and faces, for generations, always worthy of a newspaper’s attention. And I note how these “whitewashed” Facebook history posts are indirectly making the point of the “7 Up” series of TV programs — following 14 kids of various social and demographic strata in Britain for decades, catching up with them every seven years — which was intended as a test of Aristotle’s maxim “Give me a boy until he is seven and I will show you the man.”

The kids, the series suggested as its class conscious thesis, would rise to rule or be ruled largely based on the affluence and class they were raised in. Orphans “in care,” Cockney working class “East Enders” who inspired their own soap opera and rural farm kids were born at a disadvantage to Latin-reciting (and singing) posh private school city girls and boys, their uniforms and accents and confident privilege ensuring their later success in life.

Director Michael Apted and assorted collaborators with Granada TV/ ITV started this intimate series, which began brilliantly and evolved into something psychologically and socially revealing and profoundly moving as England’s version of “Baby Boomers” aged and were tested by life as they grew up in the public eye.

In every episode clips from the first installment and earlier films are used to illustrate how they age, how their attitudes evolved or didn’t change over the course of their lives.

The movies, beautifully and evocatively boiled down from the TV episodes every seven years, could make you weep. I got pretty teary when Apted, one of the cinema’s most politically empathetic filmmakers, who brought humanity and social justice concerns to almost every film he made — Bond movies to “Coal Miner’s Daughter,” “Thunderheart” etc — died in 2021.

The films first gained notice on this side of the Atlantic with “28 Up,” a mid-80s point in time where the series’ brilliant conceit and probing execution truly started bearing fruit. “Siskel & Ebert” raved it up, and the documentaries based on the every-seven-years TV series became must-see pictures for cinephiles.

But that still means most people aren’t acquainted with the project or even its abortive American incarnation, which ended less than 20 years in.

I was delighted to find most of the TV series, and several of the films (including the most recent, “63 Up”) on not just streamers like Britbox, but on Youtube.

Here’s the first TV film.

My fiance hadn’t seen any of these films, and we binged a lot of them on a rainy day recently, and I was shocked at how moving they still are.

Yes, it’s Boomer Nostalgia. But here’s the thing, Generation X, Millennials, etc. The American version of this series was launched among Gen X kids raised to believe there was no “class war” in the “Land of Opportunity,” when the basic thesis of the series was under attack from conservative elites who didn’t want the proles to know they were getting screwed.

The series requires thinking long-term, delayed rewards not instant gratification. Such series require time and cash and sacrifice, something I was made keenly aware of whenever I interviewed Apted about another film project he was promoting. American filmmaker and Spielberg protege Phil Joanou was supposed to be the one committed to seeing this American “Up” series through. Not sure why it died — lack of generational interest, thus making it unsellable, Joanou’s own shortening attention span.

But it’s startling to look on the Apted films, from 1964-2019, and see the definition of “success”
and a “happy life” broaden, right before your eyes. A plucky Cockney jockey becomes a cabbie, a terminally depressed wanderer tranforms from homeless to politician, married-too-young girls struggle, posh kid becomes college prepped barrister and then there’s the librarian with no college degree whose life expanded around her until she is mistress of all she surveys at a British university.

Some are happy, some bitter and some go through periods where “broken” is the only word that fits. But most aren’t, and life — its ups and downs — progresses, sometimes happily, sometimes grudingly updated every seven years as we note which among them was the most fully-formed at Aristotle’s magical age “Seven.”

This is heartbreaking but hopeful bucket list cinema for film buffs, for aspiring sociologists and politicians and anybody who ponders the role “class” still plays in our lives. And if you haven’t seen it, Youtube just made that as easy as can be.