On the one occasion I mustered the courage and curiosity to attend a high school reunion, I had the impression (never experienced when looking in the mirror) that my classmates had retained their childhood faces, and that all the changes wrought by excessive or diminished hair, makeup, and furrows were masks, vainly disguising the impervious looks and personalities of those who had long ago played with, tormented, or ignored me. Sartre was half-right: Hell is other people one knew in grade school. Better to stay home and watch Michael Apted’s “The UP Series,” a virtual reunion for everyone but the 14 souls sucked into its endless vortex of seven-year checkups.

Mr. Apted’s serial documentary (in England, each installment is greeted as a holiday) began in 1963, when the independent company Granada decided to confront the British class system. The producers of “World in Action” chose 14 7-year-olds from the upper, lower, and middle classes to suggest the rigid boundaries that would circumscribe their lives and, by extension, the nation’s. Today, Granada is well known for such dramatic adaptations as “Brideshead Revisited,” “Prime Suspect,” and Jeremy Brett’s outstanding Sherlock Holmes, but in the early 1960s, its license was limited mostly to working-class areas like Yorkshire and Liverpool, which approved of its activist blue-collar politics. The 40-minute “Seven Up” aired in 1964, with no thought of a sequel. It ends with the avuncular narrator describing the children at play (the poorer kids build a house, he notes approvingly), followed by orchestral chords of the sort that in movies usually signify an approaching shark.

The show was fascinating and grim. One of the rich kids reads the Times because he owns shares in it and speaks with Dickensian flourishes. “And so do I think so,” he interpolates by way of explaining why schools should charge high tariffs, not unlike Miss Jellyby in “Bleak House”: “Very well, so am I shocked too; so we are both shocked, and there’s an end of it!” Another, brought up on an immense but lonely Scottish estate, has never met a colored person and doesn’t care to, “thank you very much.” Their educations are mapped out. By contrast, a boy in a children’s home hesitantly asks, “What’s a university?” Others like him have little ambition; they’d like to become astronauts or, barring that, coach drivers. These twain shall never meet.

And then something remarkable happened. Mr. Apted, a 22-year-old assistant on the program, chose to revisit Granada’s petrie dish seven years later to make “7 Plus Seven,” and every subsequent seven years for “21 Up,” “28 Up,” “35 Up,” and “42 Up” – “49 Up” goes before the cameras later this year. What happened is that the vagaries of life trumped the political equation, not rubbing it out entirely, but reducing it – as art will – to insignificance in the face of marriage, divorce, work, children, and death. You may want to throttle Tony, the failed jockey-turned-taxi-driver, when he says he has no interest in trade unions, since of all the participants he most needs to develop an interest. All he cares about is family, he boasts – a sentimental avowal not lost on conservative parties everywhere. But Tony’s inner strength surprised even Mr. Apted (who thought he would end in jail), and he grows increasingly self-sufficient and sure, while two rich children, including the self-styled reactionary John, leave the show in fits of self-importance.

By collecting all six programs in one DVD package, First Run provides an experience beyond that of any of the individual films, not only because so much is left out with each successive installment, but because as Mr. Apted (a prolific filmmaker whose pictures include “Agatha,” “Coal Miner’s Daughter,” “Thunderheart,” and “Me & Isaac Newton”) turns each stage into a transitional moment, it loses the urgency of the one now lived in. The project approximates, as no fictional film could, the sequential vignettes of Virginia Woolf’s “The Waves.” The amount of repetition can be numbing (poor Paul is forever invoked as the 7-year-old who fears marriage because his wife might force him to eat greens), but the characters are so strong and the quotidian details of their lives so relentlessly normal – economics aside, they all shed tears over lost parents – one can’t help but analyze, identify with, worry over, critique, and admire them by turns.

The children had no say in participating in the first program, but as adults they are coddled, cajoled, and paid to reappear. As Mr. Apted makes clear in his commentary track to “42 Up” (the only extra DVD feature, but an essential one), they now function as equals with the director. At least one of them, the solicitor Andrew, is allowed to preview his footage, and I can’t help but wonder how their influence shapes the final film. Mr. Apted doesn’t explain why he spends so much time with certain spouses while ignoring others (Lynn’s is most conspicuous by his absence, given their successful marriage of more than 20 years). He acknowledges mistakes in the selection of children – only one “ethnic,” the illegitimate child of a mixed couple; only four women; only two products of the middle-class; and, surprisingly, no gays, at least so far as we are told. For that matter, no felons, no celebrities, no early deaths.

Each segment has dramatic highpoints – in “42 Up,” the selfless Bruce, whose privileged background led him to an East End teaching post and work in Bangladesh, takes a wife (Mr. Apted was about to ask if he were gay), and Tony, who gets bit parts in movies, spills the beans about his infidelity (the wife never bats an eye). But the program’s great fascination is in the way individuals bloom and fade at different points in their lives. Suzi, tossed into boarding school at 7, reeling from her parents’ divorce at 14 (sitting on the grass, resenting every question, she doesn’t notice her dog killing a rabbit just behind her), appears at 20 as a cynical, gaunt, defensive, chain-smoking dropout; seven years later, she is the very picture of maternal rectitude. Andrew, an increasingly charming and thoughtful figure in each segment, turns nervously cautious at 42. The nuclear physicist Nick, the only child in a Yorkshire farming community, reinvents himself at an American university. Neil, the cutest and most loquacious of 7-year-olds, turns taut as a bowstring at 14, and is homeless after that – shaking compulsively and fearing for his sanity. In “35 Up,” he sees his future as a London beggar; yet seven years later, though still unemployed, he is twice elected to a political council and shows once again something of the glow that distinguished him at 7.

Mr. Apted lets down his project and audience when he fails to explain why someone leaves a particular segment, a failing compensated for in his commentary track. He explains that Symon, the introverted, unmotivated black child who became a contented father of five, disappeared from “35 Up” because of his shame over a divorce; he returns triumphantly at 42, newly married. No less intriguing is Peter, the apparent slacker whose last appearance, in “28 Up,” presented him as a bitter, unfulfilled teacher. Mr. Apted discloses that Peter’s mild rebuke of the Thatcher government’s withdrawal of educational funds in that show provoked such vitriolic attacks against him in the British press that he dropped out of the series, but not – I was relieved to learn – from life. He returned to the university and now practices public law.

Another absentee is Charles, a successful producer of television documentaries who won’t participate in the most celebrated documentary ever to emerge from British television. What he and Peter and John fail to realize is that they have no more right to take flight then if the cast of a novel informed their author they were leaving the page. The terrible truth is that we want to watch them enjoy and endure each of life’s pleasures and hardships, unto the grave. Better them than us.