As a West Virginia girlie, I will always give a watch to whatever West Virginia native Jennifer Garner is up to. So when she’s cast with a bunch of other middle-aged baddies, like she was in Bekah Brunstetter’s adaptation of The Five Star Weekend, coming to Peacock on July 9, you know I’m on it. While this is a relatively by-the-numbers melodrama, the fully fleshed-out characters, female friendships, and fantastic performances lift the series to something truly entertaining and watchable.
Hollis Shaw (Jennifer Garner) is a food influencer who recently lost her husband suddenly. Six months after his passing, she has a breakdown on the Today Show, where her manager mentions an acquaintance who gathered friends from various points in her life to help her manage her grief. Hollis thinks this is a great idea, so she plans an elaborate weekend with her childhood best friend, Tatum (Chloë Sevigny), her successful college friend, Dru-Ann (Regina Hall), her best Mom friend, Brooke (D’Arcy Carden), and a follower who comforted her after her husband’s death, Gigi (Gemma Chan). These women, along with Hollis’s daughter, Caroline (Harlow Jane), enjoy a Nantucket weekend of shopping, hard conversations, delicious meals, betrayal, hook-ups, and toffee (with cardamom!).
I have not read Elin Hilderbrand’s book, but The Five Star Weekend has some of the best-written characters I’ve seen in a series like this. While the show focuses on Hollis, the other characters don’t exist exclusively to serve her story. The series does a great job of allowing all of the women to have their own lives and problems to solve while also being there to support their friend at her lowest point. It is a lovely testament to enduring friendship that even while going through difficulties, you can hold space for someone else’s suffering.
Even though the women in The Five Star Weekend have their own lives, the men are far less important to the plot. Hollis’s husband, Matthew (Josh Hamilton), appears only in flashbacks, and his story is told in a way that reveals only who he was to Hollis. Timothy Olyphant is always wonderful, but he exists exclusively as eye-candy for the perimenopausal audience. The only man who has some character development of his own is David Denman, Tatum’s husband. But it may just be that he is the only one in scenes that are important to his partner’s development.
The men may get the short shrift in this series, but the women more than make up for it. The five play off of one another beautifully. The interactions between Sevigny and Hall are wonderful, as they play Hollis’s two best friends, and we can see the tension between them, as well as the tension between Sevigny and Garner as they try to navigate a friendship after one becomes famous and the other stays in her hometown. I also love the way we see how some relationships are a bit transactional, which isn’t fun, but is very honest. Each actor gives a performance that makes them feel like real people dropped into this world. Yes, The Five Star Weekend is more glamorous and tawdry than might happen on your average girls’ weekend, but it doesn’t feel so far-fetched that it’s entirely removed from reality.
Even though all of the women are wonderful, I have to give special props to Jennifer Garner, who makes everything she’s in better. She has the most complex character to balance, and she does so effortlessly. There are moments when we wonder if her need to make everything perfect is because she’s an influencer or if she became an influencer because of her need to make everything perfect, and that tension is beautifully shown throughout the eight episodes. We see a woman struggling to parent an adult child, to balance different friendships, to continue to find success with her career, to mourn her dead husband, and to potentially find new love. That is a lot for anyone, but Garner brings humanity and authenticity to this character, taking something that could be seen as pedestrian and elevating it to something much more.
The only frustration that I have with The Five Star Weekend is the inclusion of a story line with Hollis’s former friend, Electra. Judy Greer is of course wonderful, but her character is shallow and serves no purpose for the rest of the show. I would have much rather seen Caroline’s story apart from her mother given a bit more breathing room, as it feels a bit thin. The Electra story is entirely fluff and doesn’t serve the broader story at all, and cutting it to give us more of Caroline’s story would have made that stronger.
The Five Star Weekend isn’t the kind of television series that is likely to be a big, splashy event. Plenty will write it off as a melodrama or some chick-lit show that doesn’t deserve your attention. And while it is both of those things, there is something at its heart that is lovely. Your girlfriends will be there for you when you need them. It might be easier at a big house in Nantucket, but regardless, they will show up.
Rating: 4/5
All 8 episodes of The Five Star Weekend will be available to stream on Peacock on Thursday, July 9.