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.

As I was watching this episode, “Curriculum Unavailable,” I remember calmly thinking something like, “Huh. That would really explain Leonard.” The possibility that “Community” might be about to “St. Elsewhere” its audience (“St. Elsewhere” ended on the reveal that everything that had happened in the series had all taken place inside the mind of an autistic boy) was not particularly alarming to me. Group psychosis explained a lot about the show’s extremely dark psychology, and, anyway, on “Community,” stranger things had happened.

As of late Friday evening, when “Community’s” creator and showrunner Dan Harmon was abruptly fired by Sony from the show he obsessively oversaw, I’ve realized that the real reason I was unphased by “Curriculum Unavailable” was because I was already very comfortable with thinking about “Community” as the figment of someone’s feverish imagination. That someone was just Dan Harmon.

Writing about “2 Broke Girls” recently, I noted that there is a fault line running through television where art rubs up against commerce. I should have saved that metaphor, because this “Community” situation is like an 8.0 on the art-commerce Richter scale. Consider the aftershocks: The perpetually low-rated, but fanatically beloved “Community” was just renewed by NBC for a fourth, 13-episode season. Why renew it just to fire the guy responsible for it? To escape the bad press of canceling a critically acclaimed series? Or is it the opposite impulse — to make enough episodes to get the show into syndication?

Harmon is an infamously — and self-proclaimed — difficult guy to work for and with. Earlier this year, he got into a public fight with “Community’s” Chevy Chase after Harmon played an incensed voice mail from Chase at a public event. Harmon apologized, though not to Chase, and a few weeks later was back to calling him a jerk on Twitter. If Harmon’s behavior was bad enough to get him fired, it was also the same crazy mentality that made “Community” one of the strangest shows to ever air on network television. How badly behaved does a great artist have to be to get kicked off his own creation without so much as a phone call?

Speaking about “Community” last week, before the news about Harmon was public, Bob Greenblatt, the head of NBC, said “Shows lose showrunners all the time and do well.” This is and isn’t true. Workaday TV shows, procedurals, sitcoms, long-running dramas, change showrunners all the time. But for the growing number of auteurist series driven largely by one personality — everything from “The Sopranos” and ‘The Wire” to “Louie” and, yes, “Community” — a showrunner change is not common, and is usually about as imaginable or advisable as Matt Weiner getting fired from “Mad Men” and that show soldiering on without him. It happens — Aaron Sorkin left “The West Wing” after four years, for example — but the shows are never the same.

“Community” seems to me particularly poorly designed to continue without Harmon. If “Community” were a more standard comedy, the new showrunners — two writers from “Happy Endings” — would just have to take the seven characters and make them funny. But causing belly laughs seems secondary to “Community’s” précis, which emphasizes being exhilaratingly clever, formalistically inventive and impressively bonkers over being laugh-out-loud hilarious. Harmon’s approach to television has always been almost athletic: With each episode, he sets out to break his previous record for genre bending, to outdo what everyone else has done before. To make “Community” “Community” then, the new writers don’t just have to tell jokes, they have to maintain its outdo spirit. They have to outrun or at least keep pace with Dan Harmon’s brain.

And because of his “let’s boldly go where no TV show has ever gone before!” ethos, Harmon has long since made his brain a major, off-screen character on “Community.” More than most other showrunners, even the great ones, one can feel Harmon in each episode, egging the show on to new heights, exposing the mechanics of the genre. I could watch Troy and Abed do their secret handshake 1,000 times a day, but I don’t watch “Community” for Troy and Abed, adorable besties that they are. I watch for the episodes with multiple timelines, for Dungeons & Dragons games come to life, for claymation Christmas specials, and for “My Dinner With Andre” and “Die Hard” spoofs. I watch for Dan Harmon’s unmatched and, now it seems, unsustainable ambition. Oh, damn it. I guess I mean watched.

This year, about 20 new shows will premiere in the fall, with another dozen waiting in the mid-season wings. There are dramas about haunted luxury apartments, islands armed with nuclear arsenals and the making of Vegas. There are procedurals starring Sherlock Holmes, Jersey girls turned lawyers and a Mob Doctor. One show has Mrs. Coach playing a country singer, one has Kelly Kapoor falling into a swimming pool while riding a bicycle, and another has Kevin Bacon chasing serial killers. There are two sitcoms starring gay people, one about a family who lives next door to aliens, and others featuring Matthew Perry, Lily Tomlin, Dane Cook and a screeching monkey. If each network had at least one show last year about a sexually active, provocative, sassy woman — the lady sitcoms — there is no such equivalent trend this year. There is just a lot of TV, some of which will be good, and most of which will be bad. Here are my thoughts on what look to be the best and worst shows of the upcoming season, network by network.

CBS is the most stable and highest-ranked network in the land, a position it has held for many years by eschewing any and all concerns about both coolness and quality. CBS does not put on risky, ambitious shows some small portion of the Internet will fall in love with and loudly plead for, whatever the show’s ratings. That is a move for losers like NBC. CBS, instead, puts on things that work, and the things that work on CBS are usually polished, ultra-competent procedurals and comedies that make me want to gouge my eyes out, but that are the most popular in America. So, arriving on CBS this fall: “Elementary,” starring a tattooed Johnny Lee Miller as a modern-day Sherlock Holmes and Lucy Liu as Dr. Joan Watson, his drug minder;  “Made in Jersey,” about a Snooki turned lawyer and made good, starring a charming British actress (Janet Montgomery, whom CBS insisted I would like, and, aggravatingly, I really, really did ) putting on a very thick Jersey accent; and “Partners,” a sitcom about two best friends, a straight guy and a gay guy (played by the delightful Michael Urie), in serious relationships, a sort of progressive premise for CBS, until you see the trailer. CBS is stretching itself this year with one big, ambitious show, with a bland name. “Vegas” stars Dennis Quaid as a good guy and Michael Chiklis as a bad one in 1960s Sin City. There is a lot of “buzz” around this program, but all I could think when watching was that in the ‘60s, shaved heads were not a thing (ahem, Mr. Chiklis), and that CBS will find a way to make this boring.

Worst: “Partners”

Best: “Elementary”

If you ask, Fox will tell you that it, not CBS, is the most stable and highest-ranked network in the land, and if you just care about people under the age of 49, it is. Since it ain’t broke, Fox isn’t fixing it, putting just three shows on this fall, and holding its extremely creepy, high-profile, Kevin Bacon-hunts-a-serial-killer-with-acolytes drama, “The Following,” for mid-season. Coming in the fall is Mindy Kaling’s poorly named “The Mindy Project” (on the show, she plays a character named Mira), which looks good, and “Ben & Kate,” which is not as cool or buzzy, but I thought looked better. Nat Faxon and Dakota Johnson (daughter of Melanie Griffith and Don Johnson) star as the titular siblings, one an overgrown man child, the other a single mom. The trailer is very, very sweet, which would make it a better fit with “New Girl,” that most emo of shows, than the spiky, sardonic “Mindy Project.” The only other show Fox is debuting in the fall is the drama “The Mob Doctor,” about a doctor (“My Boys’” Jordana Spiro) who has to do healthcare-related favors for the mob. I can’t bring myself to dub this “worst,” a little because Spiro is very likable, and a lot because “The Mob Doctor” is clearly the best titled new show of the season.

NBC has been a disaster for years now, and each fall, in the hopes of climbing out of its sorry position, it orders a ton of new shows. This year, it ordered 12, and, unfortunately, none of them look that great. One of the dozen is “Next Caller,” a sitcom starring Dane Cook as a misogynist shock jock forced to work with a female co-host. This show is already a punching bag, likely to remain the season’s go-to example of the crappy sitcom, basically because it stars Dane Cook being a dick. While it’s hard to argue with this logic, by far the most horrible-looking show coming to NBC in the fall is “Guys With Kids,” a multi-camera comedy about three dudes with babies and ladies and no funny lines whatsoever. I’m also not particularly jazzed over the drama “Chicago Fire,” which looks almost exactly like a more melodramatic “Third Watch.”

As for best, well, there’s a lot of “could be OK” on NBC’s schedule: there’s “Go On,” about Matthew Perry in a grief group; Justin Kirk in “Animal Practice” as a pet-loving, people-hating, lady-shagging veterinarian; and Ryan Murphy’s new sitcom about a gay couple and their surrogate, “The New Normal,” which I would be much more excited about if I hadn’t been burned by Murphy so many times before (and if there wasn’t that bad Mariah Carey joke in the promo). That leaves the J.J. Abrams-produced “Revolution,” set 15 years after all the electricity in the world has gone out forever. This may just end up being another irritating, never-ending mystical conspiracy show, but I’m a sucker for anything post-apocalyptic.

Worst: “Guys With Kids”

Best: “Revolution”

Ratings-wise, ABC is not in a much better state than NBC, except it has two new shows I can’t wait for. In “Nashville,” “Friday Night Lights’” Connie Britton stars as an aging country singer who has to figure out the next step of her career while dealing with an obnoxious, successful Taylor Swift-type played by Hayden Pantierre. It’s very, very soapy, but it involves Mrs. Coach singing and saying wise things with a Southern lilt and lots of sequins, and, therefore sounds wonderful to me. Then there’s “Last Resort,” created by “The Shield’s” Shawn Ryan. It stars Andre Braugher as the captain of a submarine who disobeys an order to fire a nuke on Pakistan. He, his crew, and his sub are then pursued by the U.S. military until they land on a tropical island, turn on the sub’s nukes, and start politicking. This is an original, far out premise, plus “Felicity’s” Scott Speedman is in it, and I really missed his mumbling.

Whereas NBC’s unpromising shows seem merely blah, ABC’s least promising shows look to be potentially awesome, fascinating misfires. It is the network that aired “Work It,” after all. (ABC does have one merely bad and boring looking sitcom, “The Family Tools.”) First, there is “The Neighbors,” ABC’s highest-profile new comedy, about a family that moves into a suburban community populated by aliens. The family can tell their neighbors are aliens because when they clap their hands over their heads, they transform into green aliens. It’s a very 1980s premise with a single-camera comedy execution, and no good jokes. Then there’s “Zero Hour,” starring “ER’s” Anthony Edwards as a conspiracy theorist drawn into the mother of all conspiracy theories after his wife is kidnapped. The trailer involves clues packaged in the backs of clocks, Nazis, possessed babies, and various other artifacts left over from the “Alias” or “DaVinci Code” sets. Can’t wait.

Best: “Nashville”

“Last Resort”

Worst: “The Neighbors”

“Zero Hour”