Português
HBO Puts Alzheimer’s Under the Microscope
Television
HBO Puts Alzheimer’s Under the Microscope
By ELIZABETH JENSEN
Published: May 1, 2009
HBO, the pay-cable home to blood-sucking 173-year-olds, polygamous Mormons and stressed-out, therapy-seeking C.E.O.’s, is not the usual place for explanations of amyloid plaques, computer-rendered brain-imaging scans or distressing tales of a woman told she can never drive again. But as it does every few years, HBO will soon intrude on its largely fiction-oriented lineup of series and second-run Hollywood movies to deliver five prime hours of a multimillion-dollar public service health campaign. Starting May 10, in its most far-reaching initiative yet, HBO tackles Alzheimer’s disease.
As with the previous “Addiction” and “Cancer: Evolution to Revolution,” “The Alzheimer’s Project” is a curious hybrid of science and emotional stories about patients, their families and caretakers. It started, as many HBO documentary projects do, with a personal fascination of Sheila Nevins, HBO’s president of documentary. “We were all getting older,” Ms. Nevins said. “The whole idea of what was real-forgetting, aging-forgetting and Alzheimer’s-forgetting was obsessing me.”
Like many of Ms. Nevins’s other obsessions, the initiative will get a lot of attention. HBO is opening the program to all cable subscribers, helping with grass-roots screenings of the four prime-time films and flooding digital outlets (like Facebook and YouTube) with content. From video that didn’t make the cut, HBO has made 15 short films for digital outlets and another 18 for Alzforum.org, a site for researchers. There will be a companion book, “The Alzheimer’s Project: Momentum in Science,” published by Public Affairs in May.
