Erich von Stroheim, the director of the legendarily mutilated 1924 masterpiece “Greed,” was 45 years ahead of his time when he filmed the nine-hour adaptation of Frank Norris’s novel “McTeague.” In 1969, after a British miniseries based on John Galsworthy’s “The Forsyte Saga” crossed the Atlantic, and PBS committed itself to more of the same — under the self-parodying rubric, “Masterpiece Theatre” — a nine-hour version of “McTeague” might have been just the thing for Sunday evenings. Yet even now, filmmakers of Stroheim’s stature ignore the miniseries format, leaving the eternal — in every sense of the word — costume drama to a fairly ponderous crew of television journeymen.

In November, the Criterion Collection will release Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s 15-hour “Berlin Alexanderplatz” (1980), a riveting demonstration of how a great filmmaker can illustrate a classic by making a classic. And there are other gems in an idiom still dominated by Britain: “I Claudius,” “Brideshead Revisited,” and “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy” play as well today as they did 25 and 30 years ago. But something went wrong in the offices at PBS, where, excepting an occasional visit from Dickens, literary interpretations gave way to fruitless cycles of drawing-room mysteries; it’s probably no coincidence than Miss Marple is the same age as those doo-wop bands PBS recycles.

In consequence, two commendable if flawed series, “A Dance to the Music of Time” and “Fabio Montale,” make their American and DVD debuts today. In the case of “Fabio Montale” (2001), reticence on the part of PBS and cable television is easy to understand. It was made for French TV and requires not only a willingness to read subtitles but to accept language that most stations bleep out. If the title doesn’t ring a bell, Fabio is the melancholy, nostalgic, and endangered cop hero of Jean-Claude Izzo’s recently translated Marseilles trilogy, which has attracted a small following in the past year, spurring Koch Lorber to release these 2002 adaptations of Izzo’s “Total Chaos,” “Chourmo,” and “Solea.”

The star is the 1960s heartthrob Alain Delon, now a charismatic éminence grise, no weightier than in his prime, but still forceful enough to hold the screen with minimal effort. At 65, he was 10 years too old for the role, which doesn’t bother the many gorgeous women half his age who blithely seduce him. This is almost always a bad move: Loving Fabio usually means dying for Fabio. A cabal of mafiosi, politicians, freelance assassins, and fellow cops are out to get him, but wind up settling for his friends. By the third entry, a comic inevitability intrudes: Whenever Fabio tells someone he is with them or will take care of them, they may as well take last rites.

Director Jose Pinheiro did a stylish job in adapting the material, making Marseille as central a character in the films as the city is in Izzo’s novels. Exquisite telephoto and helicopter shots of the harbor serve as transitions, and a rhythmic cutting between gleaming sunlit afternoons and nighttime alleyways add to a sense of dislocation where anyone can be killed, including several very likable characters. A few cornball touches (pointless flashbacks and voice-overs) and a near-total negation of Izzo’s insistence that racism is at the core of Marseille’s chaos, remind us that television is television, even in France. On the other hand, when Fabio tells a young woman that he has named his bar “Solea,” she says, “Like the Miles Davis record.” Ah, France.

These are policiers in which character is emphasized over forensics, in which a sense of loss — the body count is appalling — is earned along with Fabio’s conviction that all the villains, no matter how high on the chain, are puppets manipulated by invisible masters. Mr. Delon is given a fine Hollywood-style entrance: Fabio appears alone in the street, his coat buffeted by the wind, before he single-handedly settles a hostage crisis. By the third installment, his invulnerability is badly scarred.

Koch Lorber’s bare presentation doesn’t even include an introductory essay. No one who hasn’t read “Chourmo” will comprehend the meaning of the title (slang for galley slave). The image is window-boxed, which looks fine on a traditional monitor but is much reduced on widescreen. The colors, however, are wonderfully bright.

Acorn Media’s penny-pinching approach to “A Dance to the Music of Time” is more regrettable, because Anthony Powell’s 12-novel cycle, even when reduced to seven hours (a fraction of the time allotted Robert Graves’s “Claudius” novels or Evelyn Waugh’s “Brideshead Revisited”), cries out for a bit of help — not just an insert that randomly identifies a mere 15 characters. You may want to check out Hilary Spurling’s splendid handbook, “Invitation to the Dance,” as a way of keeping track of characters and references, though the four parts of the series do not cleave to Powell’s four trilogies.

Despite shortchanging or excluding many key characters, the adaptation by Hugh Whitemore, as co-directed by Christopher Morahan and producer Alvin Rakoff, is sufficiently dynamic to surmount the charge that it is merely an illustrated abridgement of an essentially unfilmable work.

Whereas much of Powell’s humor resides in the punctilious tempo of his deceptively Wodehousian prose, the humor in this endeavor is entrusted to great character actors — John Gielgud (St. John Clark is essentially reduced to one hilarious speech), Alan Bennett (a hirsute Sillary, sounding like a refugee from “Beyond the Fringe”), Carmen du Sautoy (Tuffy Weeden as a castrating gargoyle), Edward Fox (an aged and rouged Uncle Giles), Michael Williams (Ted Jeavons with a Hitler mustache and satyr grin), and Paul Brooke and Zoe Wanamker (the McLintocks), among many others. Paul Rhys brings a raw nerveless edge to the alcoholic Charles Stringham, and no one who sees this adaptation can ever read Powell without seeing and hearing the North Country insolence of Adrian Scarborough’s pitch-perfect quiggin.

One difficulty with the material, which as a study in time extends Shakespeare’s seven ages to the brink of television’s “seven up,” is that the central character and narrator, Nick Jenkins — a bastion of normality even when engaged, like everyone else, in the cycle of musical beds — is too remote to generate much dramatic interest. Three actors divide the part, including James Purefoy and the always persuasive John Standing, but they are asked to do little more than alternate expressions of bemusement and confusion.

Happily, the two most extreme characters — the unforgettable, incessantly recurring Widmerpools — are amplified to a point just short of caricature. Simon Russell Beale plays Kenneth from public school to death, his fat bespectacled face a frequent magnet for carelessly flung food. Not even Widmerpool deserves a wife like Pamela Flitton, the greatest femme fatale since Lady Macbeth, who is suspected of committing suicide so that the last of her many lovers can enjoy a spot of necrophilia. Miranda Richardson’s performance secretes venom.

But the adaptation makes some strange choices. It opens with Nick’s mistress, Jean Templer (Claire Skinner), greeting him in the buff, which naturally sends him into a reverie about school days. The nudity seems to have no purpose but to command instant attention (it does that) and perhaps to hold the audience through the introductory material by implying similar shocks to come. Using Jean instead of Powell’s workman and the Poussin painting that sets Nick’s memory dance in motion is as gratuitous as altering Proust’s madeleine to an Oreo. More mysterious is the decision to stage all the events of 1946–47 in the mid-1950s.

Among the admirable directorial touches are carefully chosen locations, including an expansive use of Venice, and a sadistically mordant series of parallel sudden deaths, each ending with an eyes-open stare. The music and art choices are sensible. The depiction of the blitz is as frightful as in any feature film. The closing, with Jenkins intoning a passage from “An Anatomy of Melancholy” while watching a home movie of Widmerpool (who finally morphs into Quasimodo), dancing in a loincloth before phallic stones known as the Devil’s Fingers, is ingenious. The series is challenging, at times obscure, but the cumulative power is undeniable.

Mr. Giddins is the author of “Natural Selection: Gary Giddins on Comedy, Film, Music, and Books.”