'The Time Traveler's Wife': Doctor Who's Steven Moffat returns to timey-wimey shenanigans in HBO trailer

You can take the showrunner out of Doctor Who, but you can't take the Doctor Who out of the showrunner. Writer/producer Steven Moffat has officially returned to the world of quantum confusion in the first trailer for HBO's small screen adaptation of The Time Traveler's Wife.

Based on the best-selling 2003 novel of the same name by Audrey Niffenegger, the show is centered around Clare Abshire, a woman (Game of Thrones' Rose Leslie) constantly waiting around for her husband (Divergent's Theo James), Henry DeTamble, to come back home. He's not working late or having an affair, but constantly slipping through time at the most inopportune moments. Just your classic story of boy meets girl, boy falls in love with girl, boy marries girl, boy gets lost in the space-time continuum.

Desmin Borges (Utopia) and Natasha Lopez (Law & Order: SVU) co-star as Gomez and Charisse, respectively. Moffat, who is also known for co-creating Sherlock (the show that helped turn Benedict Cumberbatch into a star), is an executive producer alongside Sue Vertue, Brian Minchin, Joseph E. Iberti, and David Nutter.

Check out the trailer below:

"Most love stories end with the altar or the divorce, and this is scrambling it up, showing that love is inextricably linked to loss," Moffat explained during a TCA panel last month. "It makes the common interesting, thrilling, with tension and tragedy as well as joy. And I do love a travel story, as my career would suggest. But this is not about time travel, it's merely a device. It’s about love."

Niffenegger's novel was previously adapted for the big screen by director Robert Schwentke (Flightplan, Snake Eyes) in 2009. The feature, which starred Rachel McAdams and Eric Bana in the central roles, received mixed-to-negative reviews from critics, but went on to make over $100 million worldwide against a budget of $39 million.

During an interview in 2006, Niffenegger admitted to writing the book out of order (a rather fitting process, given the book's temporal sci-fi element). "Toward the end of the process I radically changed the order of the scenes to flow along with Clare’s experience of time," she explained. "Before that, they’d been organized thematically, which several friends told me was too confusing."

The Time Traveler's Wife, whose first season consists of six episodes, will debut on HBO this May.