What's The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey About?

After he's given a miracle cure for dementia, a 93 year-old man tries to solve crimes from the recent and distant past.

Who's Involved?

• In his first major TV role, Samuel L. Jackson plays the titular Ptolemy Grey, whose complicated history includes secrets, regrets, and things hidden under the floorboards.
• Dominique Fishback (Judas and the Black Messiah) is Robyn, a young woman who takes care of Ptolemy when he's suffering from dementia and becomes his right-hand woman once his memory is restored.
• After Justified, Vice Principals, and The Righteous Gemstones, Walton Goggins adds another rapscallion to his resume, playing the doctor who administers Ptolemy's treatment while hiding certain negative consequences.
• Marsha Stephanie Blake (When They See Us) adds emotional texture as Ptolemy's ethically dubious niece
• Beloved crime novelist Walter Mosley (Devil in a Blue Dress) wrote the novel that inspires this show, and he's also one of the series writers and executive producers.

Why (and to whom) do we recommend it?

Yes, there's a murder in the first episode and a major plotline about a wonder drug that lets you remember everything you've ever experienced, but The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey isn't a crime show or a sci-fi drama. Intead, it uses elements of both genres to aid its larger theme: the haunting power of both individual and cultural memory.

To that end, we spend most of the first two episodes inside Ptolemy's dementia-fractured point of view. He sees people from his past —his late wife, his beloved uncle — who tell him how present-day folks are scamming him or protecting him or maybe both at once. He gets scared and confused, while swirling camera moves echo those emotions. As he shuffles around his garbage-choked apartment, long moments are spent on his attempts to feed himself and remember what to call the young person sitting across from him. It's absorbing and layered stuff, but it isn't about catching bad guys or taking miracle cures.

And once Ptolemy does take the drug that restores his mind, the show retains its narrative patience. Instead of hopping right out to solve his great nephew's murder, he has lengthy conversations about his life and the lives of the people around him, and frankly, they're just as interesting as a search for clues. Take his chats with Robyn: Though she initially seems like a stereotypical spoiled teen, her chats with Ptolemy reveal she's an uncommonly sensitive young woman whose history of family tragedy hasn't blunted her desire to do good in the world. She feels fully human, and as he responds to her from his own decades of experience, so does Ptolemy.

The reward of this approach is that when the plot finally does shift to crime-solving, we know how the wrongs have affected these particular people. As Ptolemy's memories get clearer, we see how the past has affected not only his life, but also the lives of the people in his family. And when metaphysical elements appear —like a symbolically potent "treasure" that Ptolemy tries to recover from his past — we're primed to accept them as part of this show's thoughtful approach. That helps it linger in the mind, even if it doesn't deliver immediate, visceral thrills.

Pairs well with

• Treme, David Simon's similarly mediative HBO show about a New Orleans neighborhood.
• The Eddy, Netflix's slow-burn series about a crime that ripples through a group of Parisian musicians.
• Tales From The Loop, a Prime Video drama that also uses sci-fi tropes to tell metaphorically potent stories.