‘The Five Star Weekend’ is a love letter to female friendship with a starry cast
There’s an unspoken divide to TV shows about women’s lives past 40. A-listers focus on prestige series about murder, mystery, and corruption, while B-list TV stars fill out the sappier stories about female camaraderie. Now Peacock’s new dramedy “The Five Star Weekend,” all eight episodes of which stream Thursday, is here to upend that hierarchy. Based on Elin Hilderbrand’s 2023 novel, the eight-episode series delivers a warm, gentle, moving exploration of female friendship that would feel right at home on Hallmark, Lifetime, or a Netflix show like “Sweet Magnolias.” But it’s elevated by an all-star cast including Jennifer Garner, Regina Hall, Chloë Sevigny, and Gemma Chan. It turns out you can make a “Big Little Lies” without all the murder and subterfuge.
Read more Trump + FIFA = Corruption squared
To be fair, there is still a littlesubterfuge in “The Five Star Weekend” and a big central death, too—there’s just no mystery about what happened. A quick opening prologue introduces the pitch-perfect life of cookbook author and popular food influencer Hollis Shaw (Garner) moments before it’s ripped apart by the news that her husband Matthew (Josh Hamilton) was killed in a car crash. The show then jumps six months into the future, where Hollis is unsure how to move on with her life and career and struggling to connect with her college aged daughter Caroline (Harlow Jane).
In desperate need of a reset, Hollis borrows an idea from another widow: She’ll invite one close friend from each stage of her life for a weekend getaway at her gorgeous vacation home on Nantucket, where she grew up. Somewhere between the board games, spa days, and make-your-own pizza bars, she’ll magically start to feel better. Or at least that’s the hope behind her perfectly planned itinerary and personalized welcome gifts.
The best thing about “The Five Star Weekend” is that it’s earnest without being toosaccharine. Hollis’ childhood bestie Tatum (Sevigny) and college roommate Dru-Ann (Hall) are immediately skeptical that a curated weekend is what she actually needs to grieve properly. Meanwhile, mom friend Brooke (D’Arcy Carden) is relatably anxious about a full girls’ weekend with women she doesn’t even know. That goes double for Gigi (Chan), an effortlessly glamorous pilot who has never even met Hollis in person before. She’s one of Hollis’s Instagram followers, who reached out after Matthew died, and even she seems to think it’s a little strange that their online friendship has now gone IRL in such an intensive way.
On the surface, “The Five Star Weekend” serves up the gorgeous visuals of a Nancy Meyers movie by way of Meghan Markle’s cooking show—complete with a lovely showcase of life on Nantucket. Yet showrunner Bekah Brunstetter (“This Is Us”) is equally interested in the thornier, pricklier complexities bubbling beneath the surface of the picturesque exterior. These women don’t just immediately love one another in the name of “sisterhood,” and each also has something they’re dealing with across the weekend, from medical scares to online cancellations to unhappy marriages. There are jokes about sex, conversations about menopause, and a whole lot of unpacking about what it means to reinvent yourself in midlife.
It’s not challenging, exactly, but it is thoughtful, and the writing is elevated even further by the talented ensemble. Where these very different women could easily feel like archetypes on a checklist, the performers imbue them with a real sense of history and specificity—from Sevigny’s small-town earthiness to Hall’s ambitious confidence to Carden’s manic people-pleasing tendencies and Chan’s ethereal gentility. There’s a new dynamic to explore each time they break off into different combos across the weekend. Sevigny and Hall are particularly great at capturing Tatum and Dru-Ann’s simmering competitiveness over Hollis’ friendship. It’s a rivalry that has a two-decade history of its own.
Indeed, Brunstetter has a keen eye for the way relationships drift and change over time and how different people can bring out different qualities in each other. Hollis is one person with the friend she used to sneak cigarettes with in high school and another with the one she ran PTA meetings with in her 30s. That gives Garner a whole lot to work with in a funny, moving central performance that calls to mind her turn in the underrated grief-themed rom-com “Catch and Release”—a connection the show leans into by casting co-star Timothy Olyphant as Hollis’ old high school sweetheart Jack. While Garner’s career has felt a little sporadic as of late, bouncing back and forth between family comedies and her own prestige thriller series for Apple TV, “The Five Star Weekend” harnesses her signature Type-A whimsy to full effect.
Though “The Five Star Weekend” can occasionally come a little unbalanced in its attempt to mix fizzy comedy with weepy melodrama, the cast is charming enough to steady the wobbles. Even when the road gets bumpy, it’s a pleasure to spend time with these women and to follow the various twists and turns of their jam-packed weekend. The fact that the episodes are 35-45 minutes and each themed around an episodic event like a pajama dance party or a Saturday afternoon shopping trip also helps the whole show go down as easily as one of Hollis’ themed cocktails. Equal parts cozy and cathartic, “The Five Star Weekend” proves women over 40 don’t need thriller throughlines to be interesting. Just living their lives is enough.
THE FIVE STAR WEEKEND
Starring: Jennifer Garner, Regina Hall, Chloe Sevigny, D’Arcy Carden, and Gemma Cho. Streaming on Peacock Thursday
Read more I was born 65 years ago. The economic changes have been head-spinning — and not always fair.
Post Comment