On his podcast, novelist and screenwriter Bret Easton Ellis often opines that the current “Golden Age of Television” is somewhat overrated, mainly because the very nature of serialized writing demands so much focus on story and plot rather than on character. I found myself thinking about his TV/movies dichotomy while watching “Miss Sloane,” a movie calls to mind the “Mad Men” style of contemporary cable drama — in ways both good and bad.
One can imagine Jessica Chastain’s Elizabeth Sloane as (to borrow TV critic Brett Martin’s phrase) a “difficult woman” anchoring a series on HBO, Showtime, Netflix, AMC or FX.