Why the Up series is not like Boyhood

I've now caught "up" with the Up Series, having watched Michale Apted's 56 Up last night. Overall, my thoughts are similar to what I sensed watching 49 Up pretty recently: the changes among the subjects diminish as the series progresses and the 7-year intervals become a steadily narrow interval in their lives: all of the subjects at 56 were quite recognizable, and the life changes were never dramatic at this point. The subjects now for the most part have grandchildren or their children are moving into adult lives of their own. We again see that most of the subjects have prospered to a surprising degree, despite the continued lament about the decline of the British economy under the Tories. The sense that social class plays an enormous role in the destinies of the characters, crossing generations, is reinforced: only one, maybe two of the working class subjects have defied the expectations. All but one have married at least once; all of the married subjects except perhaps one, who's kind of protective of some of his privacy, have children. We know very little about the parents of any of the subjects, other than by reference and inference - we see a few in a few clips of the films over the years but, by design, they never speak on camera. Some of the striking elements in 56: the subjects increasingly talk about the series itself and how it has affected their lives. They address Apted on camera a lot more - obviously they have grown quite close over the years, in some cases. Perhaps the smartest and most reflective discussion in this segment is between Suzy - the daughter of wealth who went to "public" school but skipped college, and the engineering professor who's settled in America: she (like many of the other subjects) laments that the series reduces her entire life to a few quotations and has missed in some essential way the story of who she is; he (I forget his name, sorry), responds that it's not about him as a person or any of them as individuals, it's about each of them as "everyman/woman" and about how people evolve over time; in other words, it's not meant to be a portrait of him in the way that a biopic or even the great recent feature film w/ often compared with Up, Boyhood, is a portrait of a particular life - it's a portrait of anyone's life, in a sense of everyone's.