WE HAVE GOOD BOOKS, TOO : 'Masterpiece Theatre' goes American.

Anglophobes rejoice! After thirty years, the creators of "Masterpiece Theatre" have acknowledged that Britain holds no monopoly on literary brilliance. This fall the cosily middlebrow PBS series finally visits home turf with the debut of the American Collection--nine adaptations of Yankee works, scheduled to air over the next three years. The Collection kicks off on October 25 with "Cora Unashamed," based on the short story by Langston Hughes (with an encore broadcast on October 29). Future programs will be devoted to Henry James's The American (slated for January 2001), Willa Cather's The Song of the Lark, Esmeralda Santiago's Almost a Woman, and James Agee's A Death in the Family, among others.

What took them so long? Launched in January 1971 with a twelve-part epic about Sir Winston Churchill's ancestors, "Masterpiece Theatre" has long exemplified that deplorable American snobbishness that values British culture over the homegrown stuff. This mindset has recently reigned on Broadway, dominated over the past few years by U.K.-birthed imports like The Blue Room. (Common wisdom in nonprofit theater circles holds, a little bitterly, that the Pulitzer Prize-winning Wit could have transferred successfully to Broadway had playwright or director been British).

Some deep-seated inferiority complex on our part makes British art seem smarter and classier than it really is--as "Masterpiece Theatre" has often demonstrated with panache. The novels of Joanna Trollope (The Choir, etc.) may inspire superbly entertaining television, but are they really masterpieces? And remember the telecasts, during the 1995-96 season, of that modern chef d'oeuvre, "Prime Suspect"?

Full disclosure: Mystery-addict that I am, I found "Prime Suspect" irresistible. But I cheerfully acknowledge that such police procedurals belong on "Mystery!" rather than with adaptations of Oliver Twist and Anna Karenina. The work that inspires the American Collection's initial offering is, perhaps, not one of literature's top-drawer masterpieces either. The first fourteen pages of Langston Hughes's "Cora Unashamed" are an extended set-up for the fifteenth and concluding one, in which the personality of the eponymous heroine undergoes an astonishing metamorphosis. Born into the only African-American family in a tiny Iowa town, Cora spends the years of the Depression working as maid to the Studevant family, suffering the whims of the imperious Mrs. Studevant, until that matriarch brings tragedy upon the household. As a fictional character, Cora is little more than the sum of her circumstances--unmarried mother, exploited servant--at least until her final transformation.

In PBS's version, however, the high-octane talents of actress Regina Taylor (best known from her work on the series "I'll Fly Away") turn Cora into a smoldering dreamer. Suggesting battened-down rebellion through carefully guarded expression and movement--the way she holds her head while answering Mrs. Studevant, the way she draws in a sharp breath while passing biscuits around the family's dinner table--Taylor gives Cora such magnetism that the maid's final explosion is convincing in a way that it isn't in Hughes's story. Cherry Jones pulls off less of a coup with the role of Mrs. Studevant, but then what can you do with lines like "The only thing I prayed for when I was pregnant was that she wouldn't have freckles"? Screenwriter Ann Peacock has fleshed out the personality of Cora's mother (C.C.H. Pounder) and other Hughes characters, but left Mrs. Studevant a two-dimensional, prejudiced social climber.

Using Peacock's screenplay and emphasizing quiet scenes of domesticity, director Deborah M. Pratt has eked Hughes's tale out to a rather dawdling two hours. Unfortunately, she and her collaborators have also added a heavy dose of sentimentality. Love scenes take place in a breeze-swept cornfield that seems to have been lifted from an Estee Lauder perfume ad. A love letter waxes absurdly eloquent with statements like "I will see you in the cornfield; I will see you where the blue grass grows." And in the aftermath of a child's death, the camera dwells mawkishly on an empty chair and an empty swing, as if Charles Dickens were playing cinematographer.

It's almost as if the creative team at PBS, unsure that American works will really clear the masterpiece bar, has emphasized emotion, so that viewers will at least feel something. You can sense a similar hesitancy from the American Collection's credit sequence--one whose sepia-tinged fadeaways diverge drastically from the usual prelude to Russell Baker. "Masterpiece Theatre" episodes heretofore have bounded off to a smugly confident start as the camera pans over an aristocratic library, luxuriating across leather-bound volumes to the triumphant strains of J.J. Mouret's "Fanfare for the King's Supper." Episodes in the American collection, by contrast, float into existence to a wistful melody by John Williams (Yo-Yo Ma plays the cello) while cursive-inked pages fade in and out, stamped occasionally by silhouetted Americana--a paddle boat, a farm, the Statue of Liberty.

In the traditional "Masterpiece Theatre" opener, the camera moves slowly over a book-lined study where literature is seen as a fait accompli, an accessory to a successful lifestyle, like a satin smoking jacket. In the American Collection's sequence, literature seems fragile and open-ended. It's a vision of literature, perhaps, that solicits the opinion of the audience rather than dictates ex cathedra. Are these works masterpieces or are they not? You decide.