PBS’ “Masterpiece Classic” kicks off a new season with a new host, Laura Linney, and two new productions of seminal novels, courtesy of Thomas Hardy and Tom Hardy.

First a word about Linney (pictured above), who brings an all-American warmth to her role as host. This as opposed to predecessor Gillian Anderson’s chilly, almost neurotic demeanor. It’s fascinating that what makes a good, even great actress — and I think Linney and Anderson are exceptional — does not necessarily make a good TV host. You have to be comfortable in yourself. Linney just demonstrates a far greater comfort zone.Now on to the new adaptations of Thomas Hardy’s “Tess of the D’Urbervilles” (9 p.m. Sunday and Jan. 11) and Emily Brontë’s “Wuthering Heights” (9 p.m.  Jan. 18 and 25), both on Thirteen-WNET locally.

When I was in convent school, we always read books like “Tess,” a classic example of the “Don’t Let This Happen to You” genre that the nuns favored. Poor Tess (Gemma Arterton) yearns to be a schoolteacher in rural 19th-century England but is done in by poverty, parental greed and ignorance and male lust in the person of cousin Alec (Hans Matheson, always good at playing a louse). Even Tess’ white knight of a hubby, Angel Clare (the delectable Eddie Redmayne) isn’t strong enough to save her.

Good people trapped by terrible circumstances, particularly grinding poverty, is a recurring theme in Hardy, as it is in Dickens. (How appropriate, then, for our depressed times that this Hardy adaptation leads off a “Masterpiece” lineup that includes a marathon of Dickens’ offerings.)

Yet Hardy’s novels are also about the way goodness shines amid the coal lumps of misery. His Tess is a diamond in the rough, and so is Arterton, who was the doomed Bond girl in “Quantum of Solace.”

Even in the shadow of the grave, her Tess remains true to her passions and poetic ideals — of which Hardy would heartily approve.

“Wuthering Heights” — starring that other Hardy, Tom, as one of literature’s great antiheroes, the brutal yet riveting Heathcliff — is more problematic. The production eliminates the framing device of Mr. Lockwood — who tells and is told the story of 19th-century Yorkshire lovers Heathcliff and Cathy (Charlotte Riley) and the devastation that results from their all-consuming passion. Instead, the opening plunks us down in the second part of the book, which deals with the next generation of Cathy and Heathcliff’s relations, who reverse the pattern of familial destruction.

Without a knowledge of the book — sadly lacking in our culture — viewers may be lost at first and thus, turned off.

Adaptations of “Wuthering Heights” are mostly unsatisfying. The best I’ve seen was an uneven 1992 film starring Ralph Fiennes and Juliette Binoche, who had terrific chemistry and came closest to capturing the book’s savage beauty.

Therein lies the problem: Who is really like Heathcliff or Cathy — each so obsessed with the other as his/herself’s other half that they wreak havoc on everything and everyone around them? These aren’t people. Rather they are deliberate metaphors for Byronic willfulness, Romantic oneness with nature and transcendence in death. That’s hard to play.

Once the new miniseries settles on the can’t-live-with-him-can’t-live-without-him story of the grownup Heathcliff and Cathy, accompanied by a gypsy violin to evoke Heathcliff’s mysterious past, it takes off, briefly. Ultimately, the adaptation is constrained by writer Peter Browker’s choices — more sex than passion, for one — and by newcomer Riley’s superficial turn as Cathy. Brontë’s heroine is a great tragic figure, who in betraying Heathcliff, betrays herself. Riley never approaches that depth.

Hardy — so good as the rakish Robert Dudley, the love of Elizabeth I’s life, in PBS’ “The Virgin Queen” — fares well enough as Heathcliff, particularly when he sports a hairdo and a pout right out of portraits of Percy Shelley, Byron’s contemporary and friend.

Nevertheless, this “Wuthering Heights” remains as elusive as the ghosts of Cathy and Heathcliff, each wandering the moors in search of an impossible communion with his other self.

Linney photo courtesy of PBS.