Hatfields, McCoys pitted in miniseries

SAN FRANCISCO — The bloody feud between the Hatfield and McCoy families at the end of the 19th century has become so much a part of American folklore and cultural mythology that it would be unthinkable to refer to it, even 130 years after it started, as the McCoys and the Hatfields.

The indelibility of the mythology is just part of what director Kevin Reynolds and screenwriters Ted Mann and Ronald Parker were up against as they turned the feud into a three-part miniseries for the History cable network, running three nights beginning Monday.

When you consider that the feud defined Americans’ concept of “hillbillies” — from Al Capp’s classic comic strip L’il Abner to old sitcoms such as The Real McCoys — the challenge for Reynolds, Parker and Mann was to disabuse us of the notion that there was anything remotely humorous about the feud.

What we do know is that for six years, two families in West Virginia and Kentucky killed one another.

Hatfields & McCoys does a good job of explaining the roots of the feud. The hatred between the patriarchs of the two families began with friendship. Devil Anse Hatfield (Kevin Costner) and Randall McCoy (Bill Paxton) fought together in the Civil War, until Hatfield mounted his horse and returned home to his wife in West Virginia in the midst of battle.

McCoy returned to the hills just across the state line in Kentucky much later, embittered by his experiences in the war and resentful of Hatfield for deserting. That bitterness was the tinder that would fuel the titanic war between the two families.

There was no single cause of the feud — one thing just seemed to lead to another. The murder of a McCoy family member by Hatfield’s uncle, Jim Vance (Tom Berenger), was the first spark, followed by accusations that the Hatfields had stolen a pig from one of the McCoys.

The families also fought over the timber rights to a plot of land deeded to the Hatfields by a deceased McCoy. Then there was the Romeo and Juliet plot twist: Devil’s son, Johnse (Matt Barr), fell in love with Roseanna McCoy (Lindsay Pulsipher), who left her family and moved in with the Hatfields, incurring biblical wrath from her father. She gave birth to a child out of wedlock, while Johnse went on to marry Roseanna’s cousin, Nancy McCoy (Jena Malone).

As the body count rises, even the family members seem to forget why they hate one another, which only adds to our realization that, if anyone had just taken a step back at the beginning, all those deaths could have been avoided.