Critic Reviews

The four-part docuseries begins with ''The Memory Loss Tapes,'' a moving look at the disease's progression through seven patients at various stages. It's not a question of if you'll cry, it's how soon.

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

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

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

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.

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 Alzheimer's Project, a four-part series that began with two episodes focused on harrowing descriptions of the disease, concludes on a hopeful note with two more outlining research advances.

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.

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

It's perhaps inevitable that this project will range from sobering and moving to, at times, feeling a bit too much like homework.