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Saying that a television series depicts the English aristocracy on the brink of World War I and beyond is almost a disservice — the description sounds like yet another big Masterpiece Theater bore, or worse, an amusing one like "Downton Abbey." "Parade's End," a co-production of the BBC and HBO that begins on Tuesday on HBO, looks like a lush elegy to the Edwardian age, but it's not nearly as swoony and nostalgic as most others of the genre. Tom Stoppard adapted Ford Madox Ford's tetralogy into a five-part series, streamlining and speeding up the story without dumbing it down.

Like Ford's modernist opus, and its brainy, punctilious hero, Christopher Tietjens (Benedict Cumberbatch), the series is not easy to follow or instantly love, but it is impossible to dismiss. That's partly thanks to artful storytelling and gifted acting, especially by Rebecca Hall, who is a bewitching hoot in the role of Christopher's bored, unfaithful wife, Sylvia.

It's a series that inevitably draws comparisons with "Downton Abbey," since they share the same upper-class trappings and totems. Tietjens, a brilliant statistician, is an old-fashioned English gentleman, good with horses, furniture and propriety. He is chivalrously loyal to Sylvia, a spoiled beauty who scorns her husband's stuffy rectitude, even as she is piqued by it. She dismisses him as a "great lump," yet can't stop poking him.

"Parade's End" tells the story of a bad marriage, set in a much broader context of a rotting civilization.

And that's the real difference between it and "Downton Abbey." That show is a gauzy anachronism in period costumes; the first novel of "Parade's End" was published in 1924, and the series is enmeshed in the great cataclysm of the time, underscoring the cruelty of the age as much as its charm.

It's more cleareyed about a lot of things, including the British class system. Even kindhearted masters don't confide in their servants; they barely talk to them. Sylvia flippantly refers to her indispensable maid as "Hallo Central" — in the novel she explains that it's because the maid has a tinny voice, like a telephone operator's.

And unlike "Downton Abbey," which used the trench warfare in France mostly as a plot device to keep young lovers apart, "Parade's End" is, above all else, a treatise on the Great War, the massacre of an entire generation of young men at the front, and also the poisoning of an entire class looking on from the safety of club chairs and literary salons.

Nobody in London society believes that war in Europe is imminent except Tietjens, who has been warning his friends and colleagues about German militarism for years. Then again, he is outmoded even in those blinkered social circles, a man who, unlike the narrator of the other Ford Madox Ford classic, "The Good Soldier," isn't deluded at all; Tietjens may well be the last lucid man in England.

Except when it comes to his love life. In the opening episode Tietjens is tricked into marrying Sylvia, who is pregnant by a married man and needs a husband to avoid social ruin. Sylvia is a handful: a Roman Catholic who is impious, unfaithful, selfish, callous, malicious and, unexpectedly, good-humored — she can laugh even at her own absurdities. She is effortlessly alluring. Even as he is dragging himself to the altar, Tietjens can't help flashing back to his seduction and admitting that he finds Sylvia "glorious."

Nor is Sylvia entirely wrong about her husband's priggishness. "I will not see you incommoded," he tells an author he has decided to help. "You've written the only novel since the 18th century I've not had to correct in the margins."

Tietjens's moral standards are tested when he meets a lovely, high-minded young suffragist, Valentine (Adelaide Clemens), who returns his affections. He sticks to his principles, but the two are smeared by gossip and calumny anyway.