In ‘Ptolemy Grey,’ Samuel L. Jackson spins an uplifting Alzheimer’s tale

In “The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey,” adapted by Walter Mosley from his 2010 novel, Samuel L. Jackson plays the title character, a man in his 90s experiencing recently worsening dementia. The series, premiering Friday on Apple TV+, is a not-always-easy mix of sentimental relationship story, detective story and late-life retrospective drama, with a central narrative device that qualifies as science fiction. (Mosley, who wrote or co-wrote every episode, is best known as a writer of crime novels but also has written straight science fiction, and was in the writers room for the second season of “Star Trek: Discovery” until he quit over what might be called an HR dispute.) But there is much to recommend it; for all its dark elements, it is, more than anything, sweet.

When we meet Ptolemy, in a prologue set near the end of the series, he is a man with his wits about him, in a neat and tidy place, a tumbler of whiskey and a revolver on the table in front of him, leaving a message on a tape recorder: “I’m sorry for what’s about to happen here today. But I got to set things right.”

We soon jump back two months to find him in a different state, hair and beard unkempt, with a bandaged hand, living in the same, now cluttered one-bedroom apartment, listening to the news and classical music simultaneously, amid towering stacks of books. Only his great-grandnephew Reggie (Omar Benson Miller in a lovely, modulated performance) looks in on him; he makes sure Ptolemy has eaten, trims his hair, takes him to lunch, does his banking.

When Reggie is killed, a less responsible nephew, Hilly (DeRon Horton), is sent by his mother, Niecie (Marsha Stephanie Blake), to fetch Ptolemy to the wake, where he will be passed off to Robyn (Dominique Fishback), the daughter of Niecie’s late best friend. Robyn initially finds Ptolemy off-putting, because he’s old and strange and she’s a teenager, but further circumstances will bring her to his door, looking for a place to live. As a person who has had to fend for herself — she sleeps with a knife— she is eminently capable; she sets out to clean up Ptolemy’s place and, by extension, Ptolemy. That she is named Robyn — “first bird of spring,” Ptolemy says — seems meant to reflect a protective, nesting instinct, and perhaps a capacity for flight. She is practical. He will prove wise. They are meant for each other.

Then the series enters the realm of the fantastic. Robyn finds a note indicating a doctor’s appointment and delivers Ptolemy to Dr. Rubin (Walton Goggins), who has developed a treatment — a magic potion, in essence — that can restore dementia patients to something better than normal cognition. Faster than you can say “Damn Yankees,” Ptolemy becomes quite another person; the years fall off. There is a swing in his step, a twinkle in his eye.

He has the gift (and curse) of total recall, and sets about putting things in order in the time he has left: finding out who killed Reggie (this is barely a mystery) and remembering the what, where and why of the “treasure” his Uncle Coydog (Damon Gupta) entrusted to him when he was a small child. Until the fog clears he knows it only as “made of the suffering of Black folks,” hidden in a “little box made out of metal and wood behind a red rock way down in a well” and meant for Ptolemy to “use to help our people.”

As to this treasure and his mission, why he has not dealt with it for all his many, many clear-headed years isn’t quite accounted for, and doubly surprising when its nature is revealed; it doesn’t quite seem the sort of thing you don’t get around to for eight decades. (“Do what you promised,” the regularly appearing shade of Uncle Coydog reminds him, like the ghost of Hamlet’s father. “I forgot,” says Ptolemy, like Hamlet.) But we are led to understand in dribs and drabs — without ever really feeling it, as the Ptolemy we know through most of the series is heroic — that he has not always been a perfectly wonderful person. And it’s true that even ordinary projects can seem so daunting they are easy to put off indefinitely; I invite you to look into my closet as proof.

The catch with Rubin’s treatment is that its effect will be short-lived, and possibly leave Ptolemy in worse shape than before. You may at this point be reminded of “Flowers for Algernon” (“Charly” in its film adaptation), about a mentally disabled man whom medical science temporarily turns into a genius, or the fact-based “Awakenings,” in which medical science temporarily brings victims of sleeping sickness out of a catatonic state. Or, for that matter, “D.O.A.,” in which a man, fatally poisoned, has only days to solve his own time-delayed murder.

One wonders, as perhaps one is supposed to, about the legal ramifications, let alone ethical problems, in asking someone to agree to an unapproved medical procedure while in a state of even relative confusion. There are some not especially convincing or clear workarounds built into mechanics of the agreement and treatment — I watched these scenes a few times over trying to follow it, and am still somewhat fuzzy — and Dr. Rubin is less than forthcoming where it suits him. But Rubin is not so much a doctor, functionally speaking, as a genie, and although Ptolemy calls him Satan, not without a certain mocking affection, he’s not quite a White Devil. (Goggins’ native low-volume creepiness notwithstanding.) “I’m sure your money’s bought plenty of Black souls and bodies,” Ptolemy says, rejecting a $5,000 signing bonus, “but I ain’t selling. Me and you, we just trading favors.”

It’s the engine of the story, of course, but not all that’s going on. We don’t meet Rubin until more than halfway through the second episode; the first 90 minutes or so of “The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey” — the running time of a TV movie — are devoted to establishing characters and relationships, setting the scene, painting a persuasive picture of a person with dementia, the masking strategies, fright cracking through the put-on good face. (Jackson has had several relatives with Alzheimer’s.) Robyn doesn’t even arrive until the end of the first hour, which is devoted to Ptolemy’s contrasting relationships with Reggie and Hilly. This is all quite strongly rendered, and as the series goes on, it is best when it keeps its eye on small, real things.

Ptolemy has a full plate of business — the treasure, the killer, Robyn, family affairs — and little time to clear it. With the past, present and future to reckon with, the series shoots off in a lot of directions. There are full-on flashbacks, for one: childhood scenes with Uncle Coydog, including some of traumatic violence, and others set in 1976, with Jackson convincingly translated into his 40s, involving his late wife Sensia (Cynthia McWilliams). There are bad dreams, intrusive visions, a couple of tentative romances. Not every thread is equally productive.

For all its many characters, and a cast able to bring even small parts to life in short order, “The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey” is at its heart a two-person play, and factoring out all the curlicues of the plot, we are left with something still worth the watching, Whatever you might not quite credit in the story, or even if you credit it all, Jackson and Fishback create characters whose side you’re on, with the superimposed pleasure of watching them at work. Jackson manages to make Ptolemy feel whole, continuous, in his abrupt shifts of body and mind, whether being taken care of or caretaking — caretaking being the story’s overarching theme. (I’m not sure I buy him as a person in his 90s but, then again, I don’t buy Jackson himself as 73, and he is.) One senses too that the actor, like the character, is enjoying himself.

Fishback, 30 years old playing a completely believable 17, is a marvel throughout — the best thing about the series may be the range of attitudes it lets her portray, her transformation being, of course, as much the point as Ptolemy’s. She stays measured and true even when the script might tempt her to turn up the volume. As predictable as the course of her relationship with Ptolemy might be, as sentimental its peaks and valleys, she never goes for a cheap effect but spins it all into pure feeling.

In a way, we are just waiting around for what amounts to the epilogue, the tying up of strings that Ptolemy can no longer manage — or rather, which he has managed to pre-manage — and to know where that leaves the two principals. Happily, the final passages have been arranged to end on as uplifting a series of notes as the premise will allow. It’s a little schmaltzy, perhaps, but anything less would feel stingy given what’s gone before.