The History Channel’s “Hatfields & McCoys,” a painstakingly detailed, mind-numbing, three-part mini-series about the feud, stars Kevin Costner as Anse Hatfield of the West Virginia Hatfields and Bill Paxton as Randolph McCoy of the Kentucky McCoys, the two unyielding patriarchs of the warring families. “Hatfields & McCoys” is a sort-of enervated “Deadwood” (one of the writers, Ted Mann, worked on “Deadwood”). It’s got law and lawlessness duking it out against a backdrop of grime, guts and gravelly voices, but this is all served up humorlessly and laden with self-seriousness. In this telling, there are no heroes and, ultimately, no justice, but the whole sordid saga gets lightly burnished by its epic treatment, anyway. The story of the Hatfields and McCoys is as profligate and petty as it was bloody, but a handsome three-part mini-series starring Kevin Costner that carefully, ploddingly catalogs each and every murder inadvertently makes meaning where there are only bodies.

In this version of the feud, Anse and Randolph fought together for the South in the Civil War. Randolph saved Anse’s life, and Anse bravely saved their unit before deserting, an act that earns him the forever enmity of his former friend. It is McCoy’s rigid hatred that fuels the fight that follows, even though it is the death of his brother at the hands of an unhinged Hatfield (a grizzled Tom Berenger in the equivalent of the Joe Pesci part in “Goodfellas”) that precipitates the conflict. Paxton has a beard and a nasty haircut, and his Randolph McCoy is unforgiving, unyielding and righteous. Unlike the Hatfields, McCoy wants to have the law and God on his side — but seemingly to justify doing lawless, godless things. As the feud is escalating, his three sons unwarrantedly stab a Hatfield to death. In retribution, the Hatfields round up the killers and execute them. McCoy hires bounty hunters, enraged that the Hatfields didn’t allow his sons to be prosecuted in a court of law, but seemingly indifferent to the fact that they are murderers. He thinks he is in the right, and so he believes he can continue overseeing wrong.

In comparison, Costner’s Anse, who smiles a grand total of two times in this largely smile-free production, seems likeable. The title of the movie is a little misleading, there are both Hatfields and McCoys in it, but the Hatfields get the better edit. Yes, the Hatfields seem to be far more effective killers than the McCoys, but Anse holds no grudge against Randolph — after the war, he tries to make nice — and he operates according to the relatively untortured “if you kill a member of my family, you should be killed in return” motive. Anse forgives his traitor son Johnse (Matt Barr) for falling in love with a McCoy, while Randolph will not forgive his traitor daughter Roseanna for falling in love with a Hatfield. (This storyline, the Romeo and Juliet portion of the Hatfield-McCoy feud, seems dropped in from The CW’s TV movie on the same subject, endlessly showcasing Barr without his shirt on.) Anse’s tragic flaw is an unwillingness to turn the other cheek. Randolph’s tragic flaw is to believe in his own rectitude. One guy is a brawler, the other a lecturer. They may be equally wrong, but they are not equally good company.

Watching Costner be mildly likeable despite his best efforts to be merely gruff and tortured, I was reminded that the ideal Kevin Costner, the guy who was a movie star, was willing to make a joke. Ever since he won an Oscar for “Dances with Wolves” and was overly rewarded for taking himself way too seriously, Costner has all but disavowed the humor that popped up in his best performances (or at least in “Bull Durham’s” Crash Davis) in favor of something more macho and steely, forgoing the laid-back everyman who rises to the occasion to play the guy who lives by his guns. But even guys with guns can throw in a wry line or two, and “Hatfields & McCoys” could use some levity. (To be fair to Costner, that’s more on the writers than the actors. “Hatfields & McCoys” has an almost entirely joke-free script. In this post-“Deadwood” age, I’m flummoxed that humor could still be considered antithetical to heady, dirty, violent period dramas dealing with American lawlessness.)

Speaking of levity, perhaps our nation’s most beloved class clown once had a run-in with the Hatfields and McCoys. About halfway through “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” Huck finds himself in the middle of a bitter, nonsensical feud between the Grangerfords and Shepherdsons that closely resembles the one between the Hatfields and McCoys. At one point Huck, who is trying to get back on the river, hides in a tree while some Sheperdsons kill two Grangerford boys, one of whom Huck knows. “The boys jumped for the river — both of them hurt — and as they swum down the current, the men run along the bank shooting at them and singing out, “kill them, kill them!” Huck says. “It made me so sick I most fell out of the tree. I ain’t a-going to tell ALL that happened – it would make me sick again if I was to do that. I wished I hadn’t ever come ashore that night to see such things. I ain’t ever going to get shut of them — lots of times I dream about them.” As violent and detail-oriented as “Hatfields & McCoys” is, there’s not one scene as horrifying as the image of grown men singing out “kill them, kill them” while shooting at helpless teenagers, but, be warned, it’s not for lack of trying.

Hemingway and Gellhorn met in Florida in 1936, when she was 28 and he was 37, already famous and married to his second wife. The two covered the Spanish Civil War together, then lived with each other for a few years, married in 1940 and were divorced by 1945. Despite the fact that Gellhorn covered every major conflict between the Spanish Civil War and Vietnam, she is best known as Ernest Hemingway’s third wife, a designation she bridled at both in real life and in the film. “Hemingway & Gellhorn” purports to rectify this. She, not Hemingway, is the movie’s protagonist and narrator. It begins on a close-up of Kidman, in old-age makeup — she looks good wearing all those wrinkles she’s fought so tirelessly to erase — speaking to a documentary crew in a smoky, deep contralto about her life. But though the film pays lip service to making Gellhorn more than, as she put it, “a footnote to someone else’s life,” it chooses to do so by focusing only on the period of time in which … she was that footnote. With friends like these, better they not be filmmakers.

At least Gellhorn does not come across quite as badly as Hemingway, who brays and screams and generally behaves like an overgrown child. When we first see him, he is drinking, smoking and cackling maniacally while reeling in a marlin, the Not That Old Man and the Hunter S. Thompson Outtake. It gets more Gonzo from there, as in when he and Robert Duvall, playing a USSR general, clench a red scarf between their teeth and threaten to play Russian roulette before Tony Shaloub calms them down with vodka.

Clive Owen has been stripped of all sex appeal — future directors take heed: Wire frames and a mustache are Clive Owen’s sexual kryptonite — despite having lots of sex. (I can imagine Corey Stoll’s incredibly dashing Hemingway, from last year’s “Midnight in Paris,” pointing at this version of Hem and cackling.) As for his writing, though he is occasionally seen standing up, typing away, and floating his pages into the trash, of the two lines of writing we hear, one is plagiarized from an earlier conversation and the other is “If a man can stand he can fight” — the sort of stereotypical stinker of a Hemingway line that makes people hate Hemingway.

But the disaster of “Hemingway & Gellhorn” isn’t on Owen, who gives this silliness his all, or Kidman, who devotes herself and even, occasionally makes it work. In almost every instance, the script and direction settle for the simplest, dullest explanation of its main characters’ behavior, even when that’s in direct contradiction of something mentioned earlier. (Philip Kaufman, who in an earlier life made “The Unbearable Lightness of Being,” is the director here, and he keeps insisting on inserting Kidman and Owen into real historical footage like he’s Forrest Gump with access to iMovie.)  In the very first scene, the older Gellhorn narrates that she never liked sex, a comment she made in real life as well. But every time she and Hemingway bang in this movie — in one endless sequence, they screw while actual bombs are going off on the street outside — she seems as into it as the most gifted porn star.

In this movie, when Gellhorn saddles up to Hemingway at a bar in Key West, all sass and ass, it can’t be because he cuts such a dashing figure — after all, he’s drunk, covered in blood, and a dead ringer for Groucho Marx — but because he’s Ernest-effing-Hemingway. Martha Gellhorn was a major, ballsy, charismatic operator, a woman driven and brave enough to crash a boys club and go to war, time and time again, but the movie ignores all the hundreds of spiky, complicated, difficult, even selfish reasons that a person as interesting, intense and ambitious as Gellhorn might want to be with someone of Hemingway’s stature. (When Gellhorn insists on leaving Hem to go cover the end of WWII, Hemingway cheats on her. In real life, Gellhorn cheated too, but that detail didn’t make the cut.) Instead, Gellhorn loves Hemingway, but she can not shirk her duty to bear witness to world events. Hemingway loves Gellhorn, but he needs to be the center of attention.

At the end of the movie, the documentarian asks an older Gellhorn about her relationship with Hemingway, and she bristles. The man has been dead for nearly 40 years, she’s moved past him, and she’s lived a plenty interesting life on her own terms, she says. Then the crew leaves and she goes directly to her desk to read a letter from Hem, because, whatever the movie pretends, it doesn’t believe her.

The beginning went by in a busy, boring blur. Ryan Seacrest in his tuxedo informed the crowd that 132 million votes had been cast this year (the number of votes cast in the last presidential election: 129 million. Though that doesn’t count teenage girls voting over and over and over again for a guy named Phillip Phillips.) John Fogerty and his mop top of dyed dark hair clanked his voice against Phillips for a while. One of this year’s contestants kept distracting me from the group numbers with her uncanny resemblance to Florence Henderson. Chaka Kahn flirted dangerously with camel toe. Steven Tyler was filmed playing with a three-toed sloth, revealing that he and a three-toed sloth have the exact same hairdo. Jennifer Lopez performed a medley in a sparkly dhoti.

And then Ryan Seacrest invited former contestants Diana Degarmo, who was 16 when she was the runner-up in Season 3, and the long-haired Ace Young, a contestant in Season 5, up onstage. They waved hello, and Young said, “This has always been home to us, and I felt this was the perfect place to ask a simple question.” Ryan chirped, “Dim the lights!” And then Young proposed to a surprised-looking Degarmo — with the help of David Webb jewelry. (Never forget your sponsors.) “I love you to death, you’re my best friend, and I will do anything in my power to have the most unimaginable, amazing life together, if you’ll have me. Diana Nicole DeGarmo … will you … marry … me?” he asked on bended knee. She nodded yes, the “Idol” theme music swelled, and these two newly engaged people, having significantly boosted their chances of getting some reality show company to pay for their wedding, embraced onstage as the show hurried mercilessly, ceaselessly on, this time to the thematically appropriate duet  “You’ll Never Walk Alone.”

A wave of emotions crashed over me. I realized I had been screaming at the television. (“Nooooarghhhahaahaeeeee” or something like that.) While this was, on a human level, so ill-advised — what is wrong with doing private things in private???— it was also undeniably entrancing television. The “Idol” machine had struck again. What if these two kids had chosen to get engaged off camera? In the relative privacy of, say, a Cheesecake Factory? Would we, the audience, have been forced to watch a supercut of Steven Tyler’s most lascivious comments instead? One of Jennifer Lopez saying sweetie over and over again? Or just more commercials? When I thought of it this way, I could almost appreciate the utilitarian sacrifice of Degarmo and Young’s privacy and dignity: The entertainment of the many outweighs the needs of the few.

But this engagement was not the highlight of this episode. No, the ever crafty “Idol” had waiting in the wings a tactical tour de force: Jennifer Holliday, the Tony Award-winning actress who originated the role of Effie in the Broadway production of “Dreamgirls,” and so is the ur-performer of “I’m Telling You I’m Not Going,” that canonical musical competition song and a number the teenage Jessica Sanchez  has been singing for nearly her whole life. Holliday and Sanchez came onstage to do a nominal duet of the song, which turned into an extended solo. (Sanchez’s willingness to let Holliday steal this number right out from under her is the most likable thing she’s done all season.) Holliday, who looks like she can dislocate her jaw on command, and at various points seemed poised to inhale Sanchez with no need for chewing, absolutely destroyed this song, and did so in such joyful, reckless disregard for what she looked like while doing so  — here are some gifs of her in the act — that it almost wiped out the sourness of the engagement sequence. Here was a public act, one that was meant to be public, performed with such passion, it felt private: Who can possibly know what is going on inside of a person’s body or mind when they are as possessed by anything as Holliday was by this song?

When Ryan Seacrest finally told Phillip Phillips he had won, after 10 o’clock at night, he picked up his guitar and began to sing. Ever since Kelly Clarkson cried her way through “A Moment Like This” in the show’s first season, the winner is expected to perform their new single at the end of the show.  But halfway through “Home,” Phillips broke off, to sob. The background singers kept singing, and the confetti kept falling, but Phillips didn’t even try to get back on the mic. For about a minute, he stood on stage, quiet music playing in the background, trying to pull himself together, to do what was expected of him. He couldn’t. He didn’t sing again. Instead, he walked offstage to his family, who pulled him into a big group hug, inadvertently hiding his face from the cameras. At which point, I think that I got something in my eye.

The dearth of enjoyably over-the-top finales both is, and is not, a coincidence. Some of the shows that went big in the past opted to take a more low-key approach this May. Last year “The Good Wife” ended with Alicia and Will finally smooching outside a hotel room; this year it ended with Kalinda sitting in her apartment, gun in hand, waiting for her front door to open. Last year, “Community” wrapped up with its balls-to-the-wall, two-part spaghetti-western paintball extravaganza; this year it ended with a relatively understated episode about Evil Abed, leaving everyone to talk about Dan Harmon’s firing instead.

What isn’t a coincidence, is that there are very few good, tentpole network dramas, and it’s those dramas that usually provide the crazy come finale time. The two long-running series that ended this year, “Desperate Housewives”  and “House,” both ended quietly, which is to say in exactly the mediocre fashion they’ve been plodding along in for years. For either of these shows to have had must-see finales, they would have had to wrap up seasons ago, before they got creatively stale. Meanwhile, many of the new shows that started the season with the sort of mythologies that tend to make for the most memorable finales flamed out in one way or another:  The mediocre “Alcatraz” and “Terra Nova” were canceled, “Person of Interest” exists in the CBS procedural ghetto, and very few people watch “Awake.” The only show left that could plausibly deliver a juicy season-ending event is ABC’s super-soap “Revenge,” which finishes tonight. Its creator has promised someone “important” will die. My fingers and toes are all crossed.

Even the shows that have heeded the command of finale time — go big — have felt flat. On “Castle,” the show’s longtime will-they-won’t-they couple finally fornicated, following a very by-the-numbers “here I am on your doorstep all wet from the rain, at long last ready to have sex with you” moment. Last year had an equivalent event, when “Bones’s” longtime will-they-won’t-they couple Dr. Brennan and Booth paired off, but in a stranger and therefore more interesting way. Without so much as an on-screen kiss, Brennan told Booth she was pregnant with his baby. As far as twists go, surprise baby trumps emo sex against a wall.

One show that did bring its A-schlock game to its finale was “Grey’s Anatomy,” which stranded six major characters and a pilot in the woods after a serious plane crash, and crushed one to death underneath the fuselage. (At the time the episode was written, the cast members had yet to re-sign their contracts. Presumably, had they failed to sign, there would have been more fatalities.) This amount of carnage would have been a lot more stupendous if extreme violence wasn’t a staple of “Grey’s,” which had a grieved and crazed gunman shoot up the hospital and its staff two finales ago. The characters have long since taken to calling their workplace “Seattle Grace Mercy Death,” a joke about the number of horrible coincidences that have befallen them there (car accidents, fatal bus crashes, shootings, suicide attempts, exploding bombs, etc.). At this point, I wouldn’t bet against a dirty bomb showing up in next year’s finale. Which, come to think of it, sounds just insane enough to be spectacular.

Even without an official announcement, Wiig’s twirly, teary departure is enough to make even the most casual fans of the show crank up the Adele and mainline a tub of Edy’s Grand. It doesn’t matter that fellow castmates Andy Samberg and Jason Sudeikis have reportedly moved on from the show as well. They leave behind established male cast members like Seth Meyers, Fred Armisen and Bill Hader. Wiig, on the other hand, blows a gaping hole in the show’s female lineup. The 24-year-old Abby Elliott, who moves up the rung to the show’s senior lady cast member, is now its biggest female star. But she’s yet to display that versatility or command the clout that Wiig has. Kate McKinnon may yet bust out into full-blown “SNL” stardom, but she’s only been on the show for five minutes.

And so, after years of cultivating a stunning roster of formidable female talent — Tina Fey, Maya Rudolph, Amy Poehler and Wiig — the show is, for the moment anyway, back to a state of relative desolation it hasn’t seen since the ’90s, an era that reached its nadir when Janeane Garofalo bailed midseason. It’s a strange, disconnected moment for “SNL,” right as women are making grand enough strides in television and film comedy that we’ve magically attained “labia saturation.” And though Wiig will no doubt continue to dominate in movies as a writer and performer, it’s sad that she leaves behind no true heirs on a show that, especially in an election year, remains so influential.

Visibly emotional and flanked by current cast members as well as the likes of Chris Kattan, Rachel Dratch, Steve Martin and Chris Parnell, and an especially rollicking Amy Poehler, new alumna Wiig didn’t depart “SNL” alone. She took with her Gilly,  the tiny-handed Judice,  Target Lady, Suze Orman and even Tan Mom. Why were so many people red-eyed on Saturday? Because on the stage that night stood a woman with incredibly big shoes to fill – and one very small hat.