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In the matter of cancer it is hard to know where to start. It has an impact on all of us. We fear it. We fight against it. It looms, it threatens with its sinister tentacles everywhere.

So Cancer: The Emperor of All Maladies (PBS, Monday, 9 p.m.) the new series produced by Ken Burns, does the sensible thing. It starts at the beginning. Based on Dr. Siddhartha Mukherjee's Pulitzer Prize-winning book The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer, its opening point is an assertion that everything that we know about the cellular biology of cancer suggests the disease has been with us since the origin of humans.

This outstanding and illuminating series is an unusual Ken Burns production. He is the producer but did not direct. Burns has said he handed the directing duties to Barak Goodman in part because the topic was so close him. From the age of three Burns was aware that his mother was ill and she died of cancer when he was 11 years old.

And there is yet another poignant, powerful backstory to the series, as it now airs. It is narrated by Ed Hermann, an actor best known for playing Richard Gilmore on Gilmore Girls, and in recent years a sought-after narrator for documentaries, including those of Burns. Goodman has explained to TV critics the remarkable personal connection between the narrator and the production. "The first day he arrived at our studio to record, he collapsed on the ground, and I had no idea why. We propped him up, and we smoothed things down, and he began to narrate, did a magnificent job. But during the break, he came back into the booth and explained that he not only had cancer, he had terminal cancer, brain cancer. And we decided together after a lot of soul-searching and talking, that we would go forward, and he was confident he could finish this and he could do this. He felt it was appropriate that this be his final project." Hermann died in December of last year at 71.

These personal stories are important in the context. The sweeping, six-hour series (continuing Tuesday and Wednesday) is, like the book, deliberately constructed to pause regularly in its narrative of the history of cancer, and deal with a human story. Thus it begins, really, with a reference to cancer found in Egypt from 4,000 years ago. It then moves toward the 19th century, when both medicine and science came to some initial understanding of cancer. But, woven in, is a personal story about the treatment of children with leukemia in the 1940s.

It is, essentially, a story of advances and setbacks. As is so often in the history of science, it is also about hubris and orthodoxies that were held fast for too long. One of Mukherjee's themes is that each age or generation fashions a way to deal with cancer and creates its own narrative. In some periods the attention is on cancer from within, and in other periods, cancer from without. A core emphasis of his is the misconception that there is no one thing called "cancer." He is insistent that wildly optimistic declarations of a "war on cancer" are too simplistic. He says that a "war on cancer" that unfolded during the Nixon administration created a false belief that if science was funded and prodded it could "cure" cancer in the same way that the U.S. had put a man on the moon.

The series, with its delicately made vignettes of individuals and families going through cancer treatment comes at an important time. Another vital book, surgeon Atul Gawande's Being Mortal (also made into a documentary for PBS) has raised the issue of medical treatment for those who are dying and how, often, patients are the last to know their best options. Education is the key and Cancer: The Emperor of All Maladies is powerfully educational and truly excellent TV.

Also airing Monday

Roast of Justin Bieber (Comedy, 10 p.m.) is not educational. I can't say it isn't excellent TV, because it was not available in advance. But, I suspect, it isn't. It has been promoted like crazy and many bits are already on YouTube. An "all-star lineup" of roasters includes Snoop Dogg, Ludacris, Shaquille O'Neal, Martha Stewart, and special guest appearance by Will Ferrell as Ron Burgundy. The point, as Kevin Hart points out, is to give the Biebs, "the ass-whooping he deserves." Right. Whatever. You may well watch and enjoy and hate yourself later. Your call.

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