I’m not usually one to comment on the musings/failings of other journalists. Who has time for one-upmanship? But I felt I really had to respond to Charles McGrath’s piece in last Sunday’s New York Times, titled “Is PBS Still Necessary?”.

Sure, he makes some good points about the dilution of  public television’s programming, the dwindling of dollars that has sent shows like “Masterpiece” packing up its bonnet for the safety of Austen country and the increasing reliance on pop culture, albeit pop culture of another era. I think PBS has just discovered the ‘60s. Witness upcoming salutes to folkies Pete Seeger (on “American Masters” Feb. 27) and James Taylor (on “Great Performances” March 4). Both of these are quite good. The Seeger tribute in particular is very moving. He really is a man for all seasons.

One sentence in the Times’ piece, however, stopped me cold: “The Showtime series ‘The Tudors’ is just the kind of thing — only better produced and with more nudity — that used to make ‘Masterpiece Theater’…so unmissable.”

First off, since when is nudity the hallmark of excellence? We’re not talking Michelangelo-esque nudity or even the daintily erotic nudity of Poussin’s Arcadian romps, now pleasurably on view at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in Manhattan. We’re talking R-rated movie nudity in which pretty actors simulate passion unconvincingly. But leave that aside.

“The Tudors,” better than, say, “The Forsyte Saga” or “Prime Suspect”? Really? It’s laughable. “The Tudors” has so compressed the historical timeline that the series has mixed up Henry VIII’s sister Margaret with his sister Mary, marrying Mary, er, Margaret off to the king of Portugal (it was the king of France). She then ludicrously kills him. Ugh!

Though it pains me to write this, the historical liberties wouldn’t really matter — nobody goes to “Richard II” for a history lesson — if the miniseries weren’t so flawed dramatically. The anachronism of the way-too-contemporary writing that depicts courtiers and court ladies as if they were Henry’s posse is exceeded only by the anachronism of the acting. As the blustery, florid, portly Henry, the insidious, hunky, brunet Jonathan Rhys Meyers is completely unsuitable. (Nor do I hold much hope for Eric Bana — another hunky brunet but of a kindlier on-screen demeanor — as Henry in “The Other Boleyn Girl.” What’s with this casting against type? Is Hollywood trying to make palatable a man who was a butcher of priests and women alike?)

There’s more at stake here than miscasting, though. The idea that the author of a Times’ article can equate the trashy “Tudors” with even the worst of “Masterpiece” is one more example of a lack of context in a culture that is both a creator and a reflection of our country as a meritocracy of mediocrity. Time was not too long ago (you only have to go as far back as the Kennedy administration) when our nation was still made up of strivers after excellence. Now we’re a country of strivers for the middle ground. Good enough is, well, good enough as long as it’s fast and preferably, cheap but especially fast.

Let’s round up the usual suspects, shall we? The lack of leadership in government, the corporate sector and houses of worship; the decline in education, particularly arts education; the emphasis on the quick-fix, pop-a-pill, lottery-lapping, YouTube lifestyle; the slavish devotion to a technology that creates more work than it does. (The best invention ever? The washing machine. It actually frees you to read and write.)

But reading and writing, exploring the arts, watching dramas and documentaries unfold on PBS — these take time, and time is the great enemy of a childish society that is afraid of growing up and old and terrified of dying.

Why do we still need PBS, particularly the PBS of its heyday? Because like the arts, PBS helps  teach us how to think — rather than what to think — and provides us with the historical perspective that enables us to understand that in the scheme of great television, “The Tudors” just isn’t very good.

Not that I’m against cable. On March 16, HBO will beginning presenting the promising “John Adams,” based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning biography by David McCullough, the same David McCullough who’s been a longtime contributor to such PBS programs as the superb “American Experience.”

Watch Laura Linney as Abigail Adams, a woman who spoke Latin and yet could scrub a floor vigorously in the hopes of warding off smallpox in her house.

Abigail Adams had a life and part of that life was a life of the mind.

Gee, maybe Showtime can cast Jonathan Rhys Meyers as her panting hubby.