This 'Room' looks on a different view

Elaine Cassidy is Lucy Honeychurch and Rafe Spall is George Emerson in a new "Masterpiece" adaptation of E.M. Forster's novel "A Room With a View." (Sophie molins/iwc media for masterpiece)

Most of the classic British novelists buried "impolite" topics below the surface. By oh-so-slightly indicating but not speaking about realities such as same-sex attraction, the authors - intentionally or not - conveyed the sense of a society teetering on the unspoken.

In the new installment of PBS "Masterpiece," screenwriter Andrew Davies decides to unearth a layer of gay subtext from E.M. Forster's "A Room With a View." Forster himself didn't publicly name gay love until after he was dead, with the posthumous publication of "Maurice." But Davies's adaptation, which premieres tomorrow night at 9 on Channel 2, clearly implies that Cecil Vyse, heroine Lucy Honeychurch's pretentious suitor, is - wink-wink - an "ideal bachelor." It also makes it known that the blushing Rev. Beebe, another "ideal bachelor," probably thought that Lucy was as fabulous as, say, Marlene Dietrich.

Oh well. This doesn't improve the story, and neither does Davies's other more significant alteration, which I won't spoil here. Davies, so adept in adapting Austen and Eliot for other television movies, tries to give "A Room With a View" a new twist or two, to make his version the product of a time when shame and illusion are no longer demanded. He clearly wants to give Forster's story, set in proximity to World War I, a small dose of truth serum. But he and director Nicholas Renton fail to add anything germane to Forster's story of love overcoming class difference. They've merely added on unnecessary gimmickry, notably an epilogue that bears shadings of Ian McEwan's "Atonement."

The new "Room" literally pales in comparison to the excellent 1985 Merchant-Ivory production. The colors are too-lightly saturated, and the actors appear almost ghostly. The whole drab production is begging for a visit from the "Color Splash" team over at HGTV. And this "Room" pales figuratively, too, as it fails to muster the inner spirit and comedy of Ivory's version. The central plot is the same: Lucy goes to Italy, falls for the unreserved likes of George Emerson, accepts an engagement to Cecil, then deals with her split emotions. But the follow-through is just so much less buoyant.

Elaine Cassidy, who starred in Atom Egoyan's "Felicia's Journey" and a TV adaptation of "Fingersmith," is quite a different Lucy from Helena Bonham Carter. Cassidy is plain and low-key as the young woman touring Italy with her prudish chaperone, Charlotte (Sophie Thompson). She is an appealing alternative to Bonham Carter, but she needs a more vivid supporting cast to play off. As Mr. Emerson and his son George, father and son actors Timothy and Rafe Spall are stubbornly underwhelming. Rafe gives George a strange primitive air that makes him seem more idiotic than sexy and free-thinking.

As Cecil, Laurence Fox is little more than dissolute, rarely seen without a drink or a cigarette. Like too much around him in this "Masterpiece," he evokes none of Forster's sense of subtlety.

Matthew Gilbert can be reached at gilbert@globe.com. For more on TV, visit boston.com/ae/tv/blog/.