Most of us have had the opportunity to take part in alumni or other organized reunions – meeting up with former classmates, teammates, workmates, or squad mates after many years’ separation. The affairs can be pleasantly nostalgic or emotionally awkward, but at least they are more or less private. Popular culture, however, is replete with much-publicized reunions of famous athletes, musicians, or actors, and the results can tell us much about how entertainment works, as a craft and as an industry.

First of all, it’s certainly easy to see the cynicism in heavily hyped ten-year reunions of the casts of Friends, Seinfeld, or other TV series, where the event is really just an excuse to promote the original show; likewise, DVD commentaries featuring the reunited players of Scream, American Pie, or some other Hollywood less-than-classic, just put old wine (the films as they first played) in new bottles (Deluxe Remastered Special Editions, with Additional Bonus Extras, etc.). In such cases, the restored connections are based on cold commercial calculation rather than any heartfelt sentiments, if there are any, of the people or the audience involved.

A similar imperative drives a lot of reunions of famous musical acts, when guitarists, drummers, and singers who were heartily sick of each other forty years ago are willing to publicly reconcile today, once they see the potential boost to their bank accounts. Legendary pro hockey, baseball, or football lineups will also gather for commemorative occasions, although in such cases there’s no expectation that the slower and heavier bodies of the individual members are up to recreating the epic plays that won them the cup decades ago. Sometimes, of course, there’s a genuine creative empathy and personal warmth between the reunited members – all those shared memories and instinctive appreciations of each other’s talents – but just as often, getting the old gang together can feel forced or, sometimes, embarrassing. Going back to your supposed glory days can be a cruel reminder that your glory days are, indeed, behind you.

This is even true of ordinary class reunions, where the Big Man on Campus or the glamorous head cheerleader of yesteryear shows up overweight and underemployed, the great potentials of their youth left unfulfilled in the unpredictable course of life: some people are late bloomers, and others peak early. Reunions of television castmates or pop ensembles can have the same poignancy, as actors who may once have aspired to glittering careers performing Chekov or Shakespeare realize they will always be remembered as the wacky sitcom sidekick they played two marriages and three stints in rehab ago, or as musicians who hoped to one day express their deepest feelings in complex song suites discover they’re forever identified with that three-chord hit that grew out of a drunken jam session with their buddies.

For these reasons, many people known for one achievement have been at pains to point out that such identities have essentially been projected on to them by others, rather than something they really ever sought for themselves. Think of the infamous 1986 Saturday Night Live skit where William Shatner, playing himself at a Star Trek convention, told the nerdy attendees to “Get a life…You’ve turned an enjoyable little job that I did for a few years, as a lark, into a colossal waste of time.” The four ex-Beatles, who by their early twenties could fairly claim to have enjoyed more show business success than anyone ever has, famously rejected millions of fans’ hopes that they would reunite for even more acclaim after they reached their thirties: “I never went to high school reunions,” John Lennon told an interviewer in 1980. “My thing is, Out of sight, out of mind…I will talk about the Beatles forever and ever. I will discuss them intellectually and what they mean and what they don’t mean. That doesn’t bother me. What does is the idea that people think we can recreate it for them.” And Robert Plant, who’s spent much of his professional life since Led Zeppelin’s 1980 disbandment in the shadow of 1971’s “Stairway to Heaven,” has said, “There are songs, and there are books, and there are moments, and there are people that belong to particular times in your life, and then it’s gone.” That’s the funny thing about reunions. They can bring home the inescapable reality that what you thought was a stepping stone was, in fact, the top of the mountain.