In the opening moments of Peacock's The Five-Star Weekend, Hollis Shaw (Jennifer Garner) receives the devastating news that her husband has died in a car accident just before Christmas. Her immediate response? She excuses herself to remove candy cane meringue kisses from the oven. That single beat tells you everything about Hollis: a woman so devoted to projecting perfection that even life-shattering grief must wait for the kitchen timer.
This moment also signals that the series knows its audience intimately. The mothers of America crave their kitchen porn served warm, with a side of catastrophe, and showrunner Bekah Brunstetter's adaptation of Elin Hilderbrand's 2023 beach-read sensation delivers exactly that. The Five-Star Weekend is comfort food that fully embraces its identity—an eight-episode drama set against Nantucket's stunning seascapes, quartz countertops, and the fantasy that grief can look this good in French linen.
Yet, surprisingly, it's also wonderful. Why? Because it boasts an unfairly talented ensemble: Regina Hall, D'Arcy Carden, Chloë Sevigny, and Gemma Chan. Each woman's storyline feels fully realized rather than sketched around Garner. And the show smartly deploys Timothy Olyphant as the requisite perimenopausal eye candy to periodically break up the estrogen fest. Come for the cottagecore, stay because Garner and her co-stars keep sneaking real emotion into the spaces between browning scallops and slightly burnt blackberry tarts.
Garner's Masterful Performance
When we rejoin Hollis six months after the funeral, she's done the modern-widow thing: turning a private catastrophe into content. Her small catering operation has ballooned into a full-blown brand—cookbooks, TODAY show appearances, an assistant. She smiles through an onion dip demo while joking about the worst day of her life for the camera. Every influencer with an air fryer is coming for her crown, and her agent insists the solution to her grief-stricken retreat is more content, ideally shot over a luxury weekend with her closest friends.
Garner is doing something incredibly tricky here, and she makes it look effortless. Hollis must be a woman playing the tradwife dream while crumbling inside, and Garner lets you see both layers simultaneously. She has always been irresistibly likable, and she puts that to work. Even when you want to pull your hair out over her character's refusal to face the uglier parts of healing, you still want to give her a hug. Hollis is allowed to be a mess—planning what is essentially a grief intervention for herself and then asking her spiraling daughter to document it all for the 'gram—because of Garner's irresistible charm. It's hard to imagine this show working with anyone else in the role. Hers is the rare influencer character who feels like a person rather than a punchline.
The Genius of a Mismatched Guest List
Hollis's idea, lifted faithfully from Hilderbrand, is to invite one friend from each era of her life to Nantucket: childhood, her twenties, her thirties, and a mysterious fifth star she has never actually met. Anyone who has assembled friends from different decades in one room knows just how exhausting and terrifying that concept is. You instinctively become a slightly different person for each of them. The show mines that anxiety and personality juggling for everything it's worth.
The friends are a murderer's row of women you're happy to spend eight episodes with. Hall's Dru-Ann, Hollis's college roommate turned powerhouse sports agent, arrives mid-cancellation. Her career is wobbling after she pushed a young athlete too hard—rich given that Dru-Ann was once an athlete whose own future got cut short. Hall gets to be the fun-drunk college friend and the woman slowly realizing her job isn't as fulfilling as she believed. She toggles between the two effortlessly, easily the funniest woman on screen even among such a big group of stars.
Carden's Brooke, the mom friend, is the show's secret weapon and clearly Brunstetter's favorite—a people-pleaser with a truly grating husband who slowly discovers she has an interior life and possibly a whole self she never got to try on. Then there's Sevigny's Tatum, the childhood best friend who never left the island and carries a chip about it, hiding real fear behind her sarcasm and a frostiness toward Dru-Ann that suggests a very old wound. And Chan's Gigi, the pilot who found Hollis through her online food community and offered comfort after Matthew's death—the one nobody has met, the one whose grace comes with a secret the show doles out in careful increments. To say more would spoil something we've been strictly warned against. We'll only say that the fifth star is not there by accident, and the reveal rewrites everything you thought Hollis's unhappiness was about.
Sharp, Sweet Storytelling That Goes Down Easy
Brunstetter, who wrote for This Is Us and Maid, has a gift for the rhythm this kind of storytelling needs. It's grief interrupted by laughter interrupted by grief. One minute, the women are playing confessional tennis, lobbing secrets across the net with more velocity than any men's match at Wimbledon, and the next they're throwing a pajama dance party because sometimes the only way to mourn your dead husband is a concerning amount of wine and a Spotify playlist. The show argues that healing and laughter are not opposites, especially for women. They belong in the same weekend.
Directors Minkie Spiro and Jennifer Morrison split the season cleanly and shoot Nantucket like the real estate porn it is. For fans of the best miniseries worth rewatching, The Five-Star Weekend earns its place among them. It's a sharp, sweet, and deeply satisfying binge that proves Garner is at the top of her game.
