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This is going to sound like an odd way to praise a television show, but it’s how I feel, so here goes: I’m so glad “The Five-Star Weekend” doesn’t have a dead body. Ever since “Big Little Lies” started the trend in 2017
and “The White Lotus” kicked it into overdrive three years later, prestige television about affluent people in beautiful locations has come with a lethal caveat. Partly a hook (as if the scenery and stars aren’t enough), partly a karmic comeuppance (we can’t bear to watch these people enjoy their riches undisturbed), a suspicious death is the unwritten rule of otherwise escapist entertainment. Even “The Perfect Couple,” the first major series to be adapted from the works of “The Five-Star Weekend” author Elin Hilderbrand, featured murder as a crucial component of its New England destination wedding.
“The Five-Star Weekend” is not immune to soapy twists, and the story does take place in the aftermath of a profound loss. But there’s no mystery surrounding the tragedy confronting food influencer Hollis Shaw (Jennifer Garner, also an executive producer), nor some deceitful killer waiting to claim responsibility for Hollis losing her husband in a crushingly mundane car accident six months prior to the titular getaway. Instead, “The Five-Star Weekend” deals with the everyday burden of medium-term grief, and on the complex relationships between Hollis and the friends she invites to her childhood home on Nantucket so they can help her cope. Freed from the burden of seeding clues or inserting red herrings, “The Five-Star Weekend” can dig into the nuances of platonic bonds and midlife reinvention among its central group of middle-aged women.
Developed by Bekah Brunstetter (“This Is Us”) from Hilderbrand’s source material into a Peacock limited series, “The Five-Star Weekend” has a clunky premise that’s quickly rendered less so as its characters come into focus. Acting on a suggestion from her agent, who realizes Hollis is hardly ready to re-enter the spotlight when she chokes up on live television in front of Jenna Bush Hager (NBCUniversal synergy!), Hollis assembles one friend from each phase of her life for 72 hours of bonding. Tough-talking, salt-of-the-earth Tatum (Chloë Sevigny) grew up with Hollis “on island,” as the locals say, and stayed behind while her surrogate sister moved on to fame and fortune. Tatum resents college bestie Dru-Ann (Regina Hall), an overworked sports agent, for supplanting her as Hollis’ closest confidante; after all, it’s Dru-Ann who serves as godmother to Hollis’ daughter Caroline (Harlow Jane), since talking young women through crises is her professional bread and butter.
The painfully insecure Brooke (D’Arcy Carden), forever filling silences with nervous yammering, is Hollis’s “mom friend” from the Boston suburb of Wellesley. Completing the quintet is Gigi (Gemma Chan), an online follower and airline pilot who’s somehow worked her way into Hollis’s real-life inner circle. Gigi arrives in Nantucket with a secret and some ludicrously poor decision-making skills that make her the least plausible, and therefore least affecting, fictional creation of the bunch. But as the women follow Hollis’ rigidly planned itinerary — each phase of which gives an episode its title, á la “Friday Night: Pajama Dance Party” — for mandatory fun, the rest of the group develop a dynamic that doesn’t need an opening flash-forward to a floating corpse to hold our attention.
These friends, strangers and frenemies are there to support Hollis, but they have their own problems to leave behind for a few days. Tatum is waiting on the results of a fateful biopsy. Dru-Ann is getting raked over the coals online for putting pressure on a client in full view of a camera. Brooke’s awful husband is pushing her to stand by him in the face of workplace misconduct allegations. None of them are really in the mood to, as one puts it, do “Meghan Markle cosplay” all weekend, which is why Hollis’ fantasy of aesthetically pleasing distraction starts to crack almost immediately. “Your best friends in the world are here and we’re eating fancy nuts?” Tatum asks, disinclined to beat around the bush.
The role of a maternal, culinarily inclined woman whose put-together image comes under very public strain fits Garner like a glove, which helps in selling slightly absurd details like Hollis’ traumatic fixation on smoke alarms. (There were Christmas cookies burning in the oven when she got the fateful news about her other half.) But once “The Five-Star Weekend” gets rolling, the momentum fuels arguments that feel like the kind of deep, tough-because-they’re-true reckonings you only get with long-term ties. “You’re ignoring what I’m feeling to make yourself more comfortable,” Dru-Ann accuses Hollis in one such exchange. “You make everything sunny and happy so you don’t have to deal with anything!” Hollis can hold her own, too: “You make it impossible to love you,” she tells the ever-defensive, acid-tongued Tatum, a line delivered with well-meaning frustration rather than venom or malice.
Such realism, buttressed by frank discussions of perimenopause and other facts of midlife, helps rather than hinders the show’s ability to transport. Dru-Ann may vent with some eyeroll-inducing rants about kids these days, but Caroline is rendered with more sensitivity than most college-aged characters these days, as is Tatum’s own child Aubrey (West Duchovny). There’s humor to “The Five-Star Weekend,” much of it carried by Judy Greer’s sporadically deployed mean girl Electra, who pops up like a ghost to periodically torture Brooke with passive-aggressive bullying. (A weed-fueled spa sojourn also makes for a delightful episode-length farce.) But the show is not a parody; where Hollis’ Martha Stewart domesticity could easily tip into satire, it’s treated as a legitimate trauma response to losing her nuclear family at an early age.
In other words, “The Five-Star Weekend” doesn’t see Hollis’ success as something to be punished. The woman has already suffered enough, and her friends refuse to handle her with kid gloves; she deserves a break, including a fling with her hunky high school ex Jack (Timothy Olyphant, smartly selected eye candy). Many of the show’s characters are well-off, but unlike so many recent series about how the rich spend their leisure time, it’s not about wealth per se, nor their riches’ collateral damage. That a series finally found some new themes to focus on is as much a soothing break as all the B-roll of ocean waves and clapboard houses.
All eight episodes of “The Five-Star Weekend” are now streaming on Peacock.
