We Can Have a Little Five Star Weekend, As a Treat

Peacock’s new adaptation of The Five Star Weekend is a worthwhile lesson in lowered expectations. This is a story about a culinary maven, but the show itself is snack food, more calorically empty than its source material but nonetheless immediately pleasing and impossible to put down.

In adapting Elin Hilderbrand’s 2023 novel, The Five Star Weekend loses more than just the title’s modifying dash — it also clears the table of the book’s plot devices, backstories, and thoughtful consideration of classism on Nantucket. Hilderbrand fans will miss the novelist’s lovingly detailed descriptions of the food that protagonist Hollis Shaw (Jennifer Garner) creates in the kitchen and how she inspired home cooks of various backgrounds, ages, and socioeconomic brackets — in the show, it’s mostly chubby women who are Hollis’s admirers, and gone is her own canonical double chin. (Hollywood’s increasing dearth of non-model-size women strikes again.) But The Five Star Weekend is entertaining enough because, unlike so much women-focused television these days, it’s not a motherthriller. It’s not a death trap. It’s not a murder mystery. It’s not fundamentally about women or their children being in danger or under threat. The series’ novelty lies in its embrace of domestic spaces and the permission those spaces give women to drop their armor. Here, a weekend isn’t just time off from work. It’s also time off from the outside world that dictates women smile, nod, and make themselves small. Like taking off your bra when you get home from a long day, The Five Star Weekend primarily offers relief.

The Five Star Weekend is a beacon of low-grade, ’90s-era feminism, with a pajama dance party where you can bust a move to what you want and elaborate breakfast spreads where you can eat as much as you want presented as freeing acts of self-discovery. More importantly, though, these moments illuminate the series’ highest priority: its characters. Hollis and her four friends from different periods of her life — played by Regina Hall, Chloë Sevigny, scene-stealer D’Arcy Carden, and Gemma Chan — all have professional and personal shit going on, crumbling relationships and health scares. Whatever nuance The Five Star Weekend lacks in its world-building compared with Hilderbrand’s novel, it makes up for with the roundedness of these very different women and with the revealing conversations they have about their feelings, fears, and flaws. Creator Bekah Brunstetter’s adaptation is a minimization of Hilderbrand’s source material except for the snap-crackle-pop of these actresses’ chemistry as they initially snipe at, and then eventually soften toward, one another.

The Five Star Weekend’s eight episodes kick off with little preamble: Culinary influencer Hollis Shaw’s life is upended when her surgeon husband Matthew (Josh Hamilton) dies in a car accident. While his car slid off a snowy road, Hollis was home recording a video about Christmas cookies, and she’s overwhelmed with guilt about becoming famous for her food — something Matthew clearly never respected. Six months later, Hollis still isn’t herself. Her relationship with their college-sophomore daughter Caroline (Harlow Jane) is strained because daddy’s girl Caroline doesn’t think Hollis is grieving enough. Hollis should be launching a new cookbook, but she fumbles a fluffy segment on the Today show about her roasted-onion dip by referencing her dead husband. Hollis’s virtual life is fastidious and presentable: her hair in a sleek ponytail, her kitchen cabinets a calming sage green, her wealth obvious but understated. Matthew’s death is an interruption to the life she’s curated, and now that he’s gone, Hollis is asking questions about the state of her marriage that she might never be able to answer.

Hollis needs a reset, so she takes her assistant’s advice and plans a weekend at her community-college-size estate on Nantucket, where she grew up in a far lower income bracket. On her “five star” guest list are Brooke (Carden), a fellow mom Hollis knows from their shared upper-class-suburbia milieu; Dru-Ann (Hall), Hollis’s born-wealthy college roommate who is now a famous sports agent and commentator; Tatum (Sevigny), Hollis’s childhood best friend who never left the island and resents Hollis for abandoning her; and Gigi (Chan), a fan of Hollis’s with whom she’s bonded since Matthew died. None of these women get along. Carden’s pause-filled line deliveries and eager-to-please smiles underscore how desperate Brooke is to belong and how unsure she is of herself. (Brooke has the series’ most transformational arc, which Carden sells wonderfully.) Hall is brusque and no-nonsense as Dru, who’s going through a public cancellation, and Sevigny’s acidic smirks demonstrate exactly how resentful Tatum is toward all these rich people whose money locals like her rely on to survive. And Chan uses her grace and poise to make Gigi a cipher who Brooke, Dru, and Tatum can’t figure out and whose friendship with Hollis they don’t quite trust. These women are clannish and they are competitive, and Hollis is their battleground. And they have one more opponent for Hollis’s attention: her ex-boyfriend Jack, played by Timothy Olyphant with a breezy flirtiness usually reserved for his hangouts with Conan O’Brien. 

In Hilderbrand’s novel, Caroline is an aspiring documentary filmmaker interviewing each of the five stars for content for her mother’s website; Hilderbrand used those conversations to detail Hollis’s backstory and to help the women realize how much they have in common. It’s disappointing that this adaptation drops both that storytelling device and most of the granular character texture the interviews provided, in particular because the series loses the discussions of class, prestige, and money that the women ended up having. Maybe one day, one of the many Hilderbrand adaptations in development will actually embrace the writer’s keen observations about how disparate finances complicate our relationships. What is unexpectedly welcome, though, is how The Five Star Weekend fills that narrative void by positioning Hollis as a sort of villain, an avoidant perfectionist who stampedes over her friends’ feelings to maintain a superficial peacefulness. Garner’s smile gets tighter as the season goes on, and there’s intriguing inverse tension to how all the other actresses unwind themselves while Garner plays Hollis like a lump of coal willing itself to pressurize into a diamond.

At the core of The Five Star Weekend is a spin on the forever-belabored question, “Can a woman have it all?” More specifically, the series wants to know, “Can a woman be enough?” — for her family, for her friends, for herself? So often recently, these queries have been posed in genre shows that add in threads of violence and subterfuge, as if death is the only thing that could make a woman’s life interesting. The Five Star Weekend isn’t prestige TV or high art. The women giggle about pegging, and they do a coordinated dance routine, and they complain about the calories in pizza and pie. But that’s just it: We watch them let loose. We watch them eat. We watch them laugh. We watch them live, and that’s such a departure from the grim depths to which women’s TV has sunk that it makes The Five Star Weekend worth the trip.