If you're a Netflix fan looking to hook up with a top notch documentary, I strongly urge you to give the 7 Up series a close look. Up front, we'll concede that it won't be everyone's cup of tea. However, failing to at least check it out may be depriving yourself of a truly remarkable documentary experience.
This series is simultaneously a work of entertainment and sociological research. It wasn't included on our list of the top 5 of the best documentaries on Netflix only because it really is in a different category.
Imagine trying to make a relevant comparison between a great gangster film, like The Godfather or Goodfellas, and a serial TV gangster show, like the Sopranos or Boardwalk Empire. These are qualitatively different experiences. That's the difficulty with comparing the 7 Up series to your standard 2 hour documentary. The former requires more patience, because it unfolds its mysteries more gradually, with more nuance and detail.
The 7 Up series began in 1964, when British TV producers brought together 14 children from what they perceived at the time as a representative sampling of British society. Their diversity was in their gender, race and economic condition.
There was an overt premise underlying this 1964 program: the expectation was that the show was providing a glimpse of Britain in the year 2000. The less obvious but equally vital assumption was that these kids' backgrounds would direct the course of their lives into the future. The conclusion of the 1964 installment promised to drop in on these 14 sometime in the 21st century, to see how things had turned out.
However, director Michael Apted, who had worked as a researcher on that original installment, had another idea. Seven years later, he took the cameras back, to record what had transpired in the children's second seven years of life. And he's been going back every seven years ever since.
At the time of writing, the most recent installment was released in the U.S. in January 2013. The children were then 56 years old. This is a strange journey for those with the patience and curiosity to stick with it.
It's true that not everyone finds it engaging TV. The less than enthusiastic have criticized it for being too slow and also too mundane. The protest is often along the lines: these people are no more interesting than my friends and acquaintances. Why bother with a TV show about people I already know and whose lives I can watch without the telly, thanks?
Fair enough; however, for those who relate to the show, such criticism seems to miss the whole point. The magic of the 7 Up series is the way that it transform the banal into the sublime. Simply turning the camera upon it elevates in a sense the daily heroism, humor and tragedy of all our lives into something worthy of narrative.
This is in a sense the original reality TV show. Except, unlike the circuses that go by that name, today, this reality, really does touch something profoundly, movingly and at times heartbreakingly real. When you watch the entire series, it is difficult not to develop a sense of personal relationship with the characters: to have favorites that you cheer for.
There is though another level to all this that I think makes the series even that much more fascinating. An odd irony seems to me to run through the entire enterprise. The core idea that real lives are being documented; the original premise about socio-economic origins unfolding more or less directly into later life outcomes, all seems premised on overlooking the effect of the observer principle.
This is often, though somewhat confusedly, attributed to the physicist Heisenberg. Still, you don't need sub-atomic physics to understand that when people know they're being observed, it can change their behavior.
The less famous, but more apt comparison here would be the Hawthorne experiments, conducted at a Western Electric plant in the 1920-30s. Sociologists studied the practices of the workers, but the former eventually came to the conclusion that the very experience of being studied actually changed the practices of the workers.
People who are being observed, and know that they are being observed, will tailor their behavior for the impression they want to make upon the observers. Such it would seem is human nature. We can never know, of course, how the lives of these 14 people might have been different, what other kinds of choices they might have made, what other directions their lives might have taken due to those different choices, if they weren't (and didn't expect to be) visited every 7 years by television crews. I can only say that intuitively it seems obvious to me that there would indeed have been different choices and maybe even life outcomes.
In some ways, even more that the genuinely moving story of the 14, coming of age, it is that conundrum which most intrigues me as I watch the series. It is a remarkable document that reveals almost as much about the hubris of the filmmakers as the lives of their subjects.
This series is simultaneously a work of entertainment and sociological research. It wasn't included on our list of the top 5 of the best documentaries on Netflix only because it really is in a different category.
Imagine trying to make a relevant comparison between a great gangster film, like The Godfather or Goodfellas, and a serial TV gangster show, like the Sopranos or Boardwalk Empire. These are qualitatively different experiences. That's the difficulty with comparing the 7 Up series to your standard 2 hour documentary. The former requires more patience, because it unfolds its mysteries more gradually, with more nuance and detail.
The 7 Up series began in 1964, when British TV producers brought together 14 children from what they perceived at the time as a representative sampling of British society. Their diversity was in their gender, race and economic condition.
There was an overt premise underlying this 1964 program: the expectation was that the show was providing a glimpse of Britain in the year 2000. The less obvious but equally vital assumption was that these kids' backgrounds would direct the course of their lives into the future. The conclusion of the 1964 installment promised to drop in on these 14 sometime in the 21st century, to see how things had turned out.
However, director Michael Apted, who had worked as a researcher on that original installment, had another idea. Seven years later, he took the cameras back, to record what had transpired in the children's second seven years of life. And he's been going back every seven years ever since.
At the time of writing, the most recent installment was released in the U.S. in January 2013. The children were then 56 years old. This is a strange journey for those with the patience and curiosity to stick with it.
It's true that not everyone finds it engaging TV. The less than enthusiastic have criticized it for being too slow and also too mundane. The protest is often along the lines: these people are no more interesting than my friends and acquaintances. Why bother with a TV show about people I already know and whose lives I can watch without the telly, thanks?
Fair enough; however, for those who relate to the show, such criticism seems to miss the whole point. The magic of the 7 Up series is the way that it transform the banal into the sublime. Simply turning the camera upon it elevates in a sense the daily heroism, humor and tragedy of all our lives into something worthy of narrative.
This is in a sense the original reality TV show. Except, unlike the circuses that go by that name, today, this reality, really does touch something profoundly, movingly and at times heartbreakingly real. When you watch the entire series, it is difficult not to develop a sense of personal relationship with the characters: to have favorites that you cheer for.
There is though another level to all this that I think makes the series even that much more fascinating. An odd irony seems to me to run through the entire enterprise. The core idea that real lives are being documented; the original premise about socio-economic origins unfolding more or less directly into later life outcomes, all seems premised on overlooking the effect of the observer principle.
This is often, though somewhat confusedly, attributed to the physicist Heisenberg. Still, you don't need sub-atomic physics to understand that when people know they're being observed, it can change their behavior.
The less famous, but more apt comparison here would be the Hawthorne experiments, conducted at a Western Electric plant in the 1920-30s. Sociologists studied the practices of the workers, but the former eventually came to the conclusion that the very experience of being studied actually changed the practices of the workers.
People who are being observed, and know that they are being observed, will tailor their behavior for the impression they want to make upon the observers. Such it would seem is human nature. We can never know, of course, how the lives of these 14 people might have been different, what other kinds of choices they might have made, what other directions their lives might have taken due to those different choices, if they weren't (and didn't expect to be) visited every 7 years by television crews. I can only say that intuitively it seems obvious to me that there would indeed have been different choices and maybe even life outcomes.
In some ways, even more that the genuinely moving story of the 14, coming of age, it is that conundrum which most intrigues me as I watch the series. It is a remarkable document that reveals almost as much about the hubris of the filmmakers as the lives of their subjects.
About the Author:
If you're an enthusiastic documentary aficionado, you'll want to follow Mickey Jhonny's posts at the Best Documentaries on Netflix blog. Also, for a good time, give a read to his Top 5 List for all time Best Zombie Movies .
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