Long before Bill and Hill or Eleanor and Franklin there were John and Abigail — Adams, that is — perhaps America’s most brilliant political marriage.

Their long-distance, epistolary love affair, played out against the backdrop of the birth of a nation, has been the subject of any number of fine fictional and nonfiction works. (I’m thinking right now of two in particular from my childhood — the inspiring musical “1776” and the poignant “Those Who Love,” by Mr. Historical Fiction, Irving Stone.)

Now HBO has turned the Adams family chronicles into a seven-part series that premieres 8-10:45 p.m. Sunday. John Adams — based on David McCullough’s Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of the same title — makes some odd choices in terms narrative pacing. But for the most part it is very good indeed.

The series spends a long time setting up the idea that Adams (Paul Giamatti, pictured with Laura Linney as Abigail) is a loyal servant of the crown, who even successfully (and stirringly) defends a group of British soldiers when they’re provoked into firing on Boston colonists in self-defense. This Adams — often absent from textbooks — believes in the law, British law, and its ability to reign in the mob. (Of course, this being HBO, the mob mentality is on full display in a scene of tarring and feathering that I could’ve lived without.)

It’s only when the British flagrantly disregard their own laws by imposing harsh restrictions on Massachusetts that Adams catches Revolutionary fever and agrees to join rabble-rousing cousin Sam (Danny Houston) as a delegate to the First Continental Congress. Soon it becomes clear to Adams — along with like-minded delegates Benjamin Franklin (Tom Wilkinson, just as rascally as we imagine the real Ben to have been) and Thomas Jefferson (Stephen Dillane, a case of still waters running thrillingly deep) — that the colonies will have to declare their independence.

But persuading a loose collection of Pennsylvania Quakers, South Carolina slave-holders and New York Tories to defy the greatest empire on earth is not going to be easy. And Adams — far-thinking but unwilling to suffer fools gladly — is not the man for the job. We’re talking Eliot Spitzer temperament here.

Trying to keep hubby on an even keel in a series of stunning letters while also tending the flaring home fires is the ever-devoted Abigail. If Linney’s performance centers the series as much as Giamatti’s that may be due in part to the fact that Abigail emerges as incandescent as John, maybe more so. Here is a woman who speaks Latin well enough to joke in it; supervises her children’s education; tends the farm; wields a rifle; scrubs floors to stave off smallpox ;and then makes the tough decision to undergo a primitive form of innoculation that induces the smallpox, reminding her brood of four that with their father gone (and he was always gone) they would have to look after themselves.

At a time when there is so much political whining about how life is so unfair to women, you look at Abigail and the hardships she endured and just shake your head admiringly.

The series is surprisingly frank about passion in marriage, not the pretty, pouting, puffing passion of a series like Showtime’s “The Tudors” but the my-gut’s-hanging-out, my-wrinkles-are-showing, middle-aged passion of a long-married husband and wife, who actually talk after sex about their hopes, dreams and children. And wear their insecurities on their sleeves when each is out of sight of the other.

“John Adams” pulls no punches in depicting a couple so complete in their singular and combined brilliance that their children — dutiful Abby and Johnny, reckless Charles and baby Thomas – had to fight for their places in the circle.

My only gripe about the series is that it spends so much time establishing its premise — Adams, the initially reluctant Revolutionary — that we seem to race through the war years and soon enough, the kids are grown with personal and professional troubles of their own. Then again, the war and George Washington, played with iconic dignity by David Morse, have to be tangential since Adams and company were mainly working behind the scenes, sweating out the political compromises in Philadelphia.

There’s a great moment in which the delegates remove their wigs to wipe their sweaty bald heads — exasperated and exhausted. You feel for them. And you bless them for their fortitude and achievement.