Tom Stoppardisn't shy about tackling literary giants. The British playwright has rewritten "Hamlet" for the stage and recently turned Tolstoy's "Anna Karenina" into a Hollywood feature. But he struggled with a television adaptation of Ford Madox Ford's sprawling modernist masterpiece "Parade's End." The story unfolds over four novels and 900-plus pages. The narrative, which chronicles a British aristocrat's failing marriage during World War I, jumps back and forth in time, swerves between tragedy, romance and satire and breaks into long, stream-of-consciousness internal monologues.

"The whole thing looked so complicated to me that I thought I'd go mad if I tried to work it all out," Mr. Stoppard said.

Mr. Stoppard wrestled with the text for more than a year, and finally managed to cram the story into five hours of television. The resulting series, which premieres on HBO next week, preserves much of the ambiguity and complexity of Ford's work. (See a review on page D6.) The central characters, played by "Sherlock" star Benedict Cumberbatch and Rebecca Hall, seem alternately sympathetic and repellent. The language can be baroque and heavy with metaphors.

"Parade's End" may test viewers' appetites for highbrow fare at a time when HBO and other networks are snapping up literary rights. As Hollywood has increasingly shied away from difficult literary works in favor of blockbuster comic-book reboots and sequels, a growing number of novels are coming to television instead. Gary Shteyngart is adapting his dark futuristic satire "Super Sad True Love Story" as a cable series with Media Rights Capital, the independent studio behind the Netflix series "House of Cards." Showtime is developing a series based on Seth Greenland's comic novel "The Angry Buddhist."