The Alzheimer's Project

What's here is pitch-perfect - the fear, loss, emotional devastation and, peculiar to this disease, silence.

Thankfully, while the reckoning of "The Memory Loss Tapes" is probably necessary, the other documentaries in the series are a little more hopeful.

The Alzheimer’s Project is an ambitious, disturbing, emotionally fraught and carefully optimistic four-part documentary exploring virtually every angle of Alzheimer's disease that can be explored on television

In many respects, HBO's The Alzheimer's Project is nearly identical to the Emmy-winning PBS Alzheimer's presentation, "The Forgetting," which was first broadcast in 2004 and updated last year.

The zeal and dedication of researchers is inspiring, and so are the patients and caregivers who struggle with the disease everyday, but over all, The Alzheimer’s Project celebrates hope at the expense of caution.

The Alzheimer's Project is hard to watch. It's just not as hard as the disease it examines.

We like noble efforts. But we tend to like them better on television when they're accompanied by a sense of pacing and entertainment value. (If things were otherwise, PBS would rule the universe.) In this case, a few more spoonfuls of sugar might have helped this medicine go down.