The Five-Star Weekend Review Verdict: The Five-Star Weekend has stunning production design, a genuinely appealing cast, and sun-soaked Nantucket aesthetics that make it easy on the eyes. It is also slow, surface-level, and so committed to treating emotional trauma as a mild inconvenience between lifestyle moments that eight episodes feel like an endurance test. The book may be wonderful. This adaptation is not.
I watched The Five-Star Weekend in advance of its Peacock premiere. This review is spoiler-light. What follows is an honest assessment of a show that made me question several of my life choices.
Quick Verdict
I knew going in that this was not going to be easy. A glossy beach drama adapted from a bestselling novel, eight episodes, ensemble cast of mostly women navigating grief and friendship and secrets on a gorgeous island. The marketing material was unambiguous about the territory we were entering. I gave it a fair shot.
Four episodes in, I was checking the episode count. Six episodes in, I was actively annoyed. By episode eight I was relieved in the way you are relieved when something uncomfortable finally stops.
The Five-Star Weekend is not a terrible show. It is something worse than terrible: it is a show that has every ingredient for something genuinely good, real performances, real production value, real emotional subject matter, and consistently chooses the safest, most generic version of every decision available to it. It is eight hours of a show that wanted to be a glossy lifestyle brand and accidentally signed up to be about grief.
The Five-Star Weekend — Series Info
| Detail | Info |
|---|---|
| Title | The Five-Star Weekend |
| Platform | Peacock |
| Episodes | 8 |
| Created by | Becca Brunstad |
| Based on | Novel by Elin Hilderbrand |
| Genre | Drama, Limited Series |
| My Rating | ★★☆☆☆ (2/5) |
What Is The Five-Star Weekend About?
Hollis Shaw, played by Jennifer Garner, is a successful food blogger, cookbook author, and the kind of warm, aesthetically perfect person who makes you feel inadequate about your kitchen. She suffers a devastating loss. That loss begins to expose the cracks in her otherwise picture-perfect life: a strained marriage, a complicated relationship with her daughter, and a growing reliance on the validation that comes from her online following.
Her solution to grief is to invite four women from different chapters of her life to spend a weekend at her Nantucket home, one friend from childhood, one from her twenties, one from her thirties, and one surprise fifth guest. The idea, as the title implies, is that the weekend will be curative. Being surrounded by the people who have known her at different stages of her life will help her find herself again.
What actually happens is that each of these women arrives carrying their own secret, their own resentment, their own version of a life that looks better from the outside than it feels from the inside. Secrets are revealed. Friendships are tested. A very nice house in Nantucket absorbs all of this with the calm indifference of expensive real estate.
The setup is genuinely good. The execution is the problem.
Is The Five-Star Weekend Part of a Series?
The Five-Star Weekend is based on a novel by Elin Hilderbrand, who has written dozens of books, many of them set on Nantucket. This adaptation is a self-contained limited series; it covers the events of this specific book and is not designed as a multi-season continuation. Whether the success or failure of this adaptation leads to further Hilderbrand adaptations is a separate question that will be answered by its Peacock performance numbers.
The Five-Star Weekend Cast
| Actor | Role |
|---|---|
| Jennifer Garner | Hollis Shaw — host, grieving food blogger, and bestselling author |
| Gemma Chan | Friend from one chapter of Hollis’s life |
| Regina Hall | Friend from another chapter |
| Desi Lydic | Supporting friend |
| Khloe Savini | Hollis’s daughter |
| Harlow Jane | Supporting |
| Timothy Olyphant | Supporting male lead |
| Judy Greer | The one everyone is supposed to dislike |
Jennifer Garner Is Doing Her Best With a Script That Doesn’t Trust Her
Jennifer Garner is a good actress. That is worth stating clearly and separately from my assessment of the show, because the show does not give her the material that her performance deserves.
Hollis’s grief, which should be the show’s emotional spine, is presented in a way I can only describe as sanitized. The show knows it is supposed to feel heavy. It reaches for heavy in the right moments. But something about the framing, the pacing, the way each scene of genuine grief is quickly surrounded by lifestyle content and ensemble drama, keeps the weight from landing. Watching Garner play grief in this context is like watching a really committed theatrical performance through triple-glazed glass. You can see the craft. You cannot feel the impact.
Part of this is a script problem that is not Garner’s fault. The show mistakes melancholy for depth. Hollis looking beautiful while sad, Hollis being vaguely vulnerable in a Nantucket linen outfit, Hollis processing loss through the lens of her public identity, none of this generates the kind of emotional rawness that a grief story needs to genuinely reach an audience. She is doing everything right. The material keeps choosing the aesthetic over the authentic.
The Characters the Show Fails Most Completely
Regina Hall is one of the most reliably compelling screen performers working right now, and she is given a subplot involving a PR scandal that the series consistently treats as the least important problem in the room. Every time the show pivots away from her storyline to return to something that feels bigger in the narrative hierarchy, I felt a small frustration accumulate. By the end of the series, that accumulation was substantial. Hall has her moments, genuine ones, but she is boxed in by a character whose conflicts the show refuses to let grow into anything meaningful.
Gemma Chan is given what initially looks like the most interesting character dynamic in the ensemble, someone whose position within the friendship group is complicated, whose presence changes the energy of every room she enters. And then the show decides she is a villain. Not a complicated, misunderstood person whose actions have legitimate internal logic that the audience can wrestle with, an actual villain, flattened out and dismissed in the final act rather than given the reckoning her eight-episode buildup suggested was coming. I was genuinely irritated when this happened. The character deserved resolution. She got a writing shortcut instead.
Judy Greer is playing the character that everyone in the ensemble is supposed to find difficult, the one who throws friction into every group dynamic, who cannot be in a room without saying the thing that makes everyone uncomfortable. I like Judy Greer. I think she is a genuinely skilled performer who has been systematically underused by Hollywood for years, often cast in exactly this kind of role when she is clearly capable of much more. This is that role again. It is one-dimensional in the way that only “difficult woman in an ensemble drama” characters are allowed to be one-dimensional, and it wastes her.
Khloe Savini as the Daughter: The Show’s Most Exhausting Character
Hollis’s daughter is handled in the way I find most frustrating in prestige drama: a character whose purpose is to be difficult, whose function is to lash out, and whose method of lashing out is consistent enough across eight episodes that by episode four I had completely stopped finding it dramatically interesting and started finding it dramatically repetitive.
The writers went for the most accessible, most recognizable version of a complicated adult child processing unresolved resentment toward a parent. They found it in the first episode and never developed it further. Every scene with this character for the rest of the series is a variation on the same scene. There are only so many times a character can have a conflict using the same emotional mechanics before the audience’s empathy for that character begins to erode, regardless of whether the underlying grievance is valid.
By the end, I had stopped being sympathetic and started being impatient. That is not the intended response, and it is the writing’s fault rather than the performance’s.
The Eight-Episode Problem: This Should Have Been Six
This is a structural argument I want to make clearly: The Five-Star Weekend is not an eight-episode story. It is a six-episode story that has been given two additional episodes because eight is the template for prestige limited series on streaming platforms right now.
The central premise, five women, one weekend, secrets and grief, has a natural compression to it. A Nantucket weekend is a finite container. The emotional revelations the show is building toward have a specific quantity. Padding this material to eight episodes requires either adding storylines that the show is not genuinely interested in or extending existing storylines past their natural resolution points.
The Five-Star Weekend does both. There are episodes in the middle of the series where the forward momentum stalls because the show has run out of things to meaningfully add and is not yet at the point where it can begin resolving what it set up. Those episodes feel like being gently held in place while the clock runs out rather than being given something to experience.
At six tight episodes, this is a B-tier prestige drama with genuine appeal for its target audience and some real performances to recommend. At eight episodes, the padding makes its weaknesses visible, and its strengths feel diluted.
What Works: The Visuals, The Setting, Some Performances
I want to be honest about this because the show is not entirely without merit.
The production design is legitimately excellent. Nantucket in summer, rendered with real care and real budget, is beautiful. The houses, the coastline, the light, the show looks like a very expensive lifestyle magazine, which is exactly the register it is aiming for. If you are going to make this show, this is how it should look.
There are individual scenes, not many, but some, that genuinely work. A handful of moments where the performances align with the material, and something real comes through the surface. These scenes reminded me of what the show could have been with tighter writing and a cleaner structural vision.
Regina Hall’s best scenes are in this category. So are a few of Garner’s quieter moments, the ones where the script gets out of her way and lets her just be in the room.
And there is an audience for this show. I can say that clearly and without condescension: there are people who will find genuine comfort in The Five-Star Weekend. A beach drama with beautiful production, a relatable grief premise, and the comfortable tension of secrets being slowly revealed in a gorgeous setting, that is a legitimate entertainment proposition. It is just not one that holds up across eight episodes at this level of execution.
How It Compares to Similar Shows
The comparison that keeps coming to mind is The Marvellous Mrs. Maisel in the sense of a show built around an aesthetically impeccable woman navigating personal upheaval in a beautiful setting, except that Maisel understood that its protagonist’s interiority needed to be as richly constructed as her exterior. The Five-Star Weekend consistently chooses the exterior.
For female-ensemble grief dramas done more effectively on streaming, Dead to Me (Netflix) handled similar tonal terrain, female friendship, grief, secrets, dark comedy, with significantly more emotional honesty and a tighter episode structure. The Madison on Paramount Plus has been cited as handling grief more effectively with similar aesthetics.
Pros & Cons
✓ Pros
- Production design and the Nantucket setting are genuinely beautiful
- Jennifer Garner is committed and brings real craft to the role
- Regina Hall has genuine moments despite her underwritten subplot
- Some individual scenes break through the formula and work
- A clear target audience who will find this comforting
- Gemma Chan’s character setup is intriguing before the show abandons it
✗ Cons
- Eight episodes for a six-episode story, visibly padded
- Emotional trauma is treated as a lifestyle inconvenience rather than a genuine weight
- Khloe Savini’s daughter’s character repeats the same conflict for seven episodes
- Gemma Chan is reduced to a flat villain when the writing ran out of ideas
- Regina Hall is boxed in by a subplot that the show refuses to develop
- Judy Greer is typecasting she deserves to escape
- Dialogue relies heavily on clichéd platitudes and on-the-nose exposition
- The grief at the center never feels raw enough to be genuinely moving
Is The Five-Star Weekend Good?
For genre fans who love beach dramas and ensemble women’s fiction adaptations, it is watchable. It is comfortable. It is exactly what it promises in the marketing material, which, for the right viewer, is a reasonable trade.
For anyone hoping that the premise, grief, friendship, secrets, and beautiful setting will be given serious dramatic treatment, it will probably disappoint you the way it disappointed me. The show has the ingredients for something affecting. It uses them to make something decorative.
Where to Watch The Five-Star Weekend
The Five-Star Weekend is streaming exclusively on Peacock. All eight episodes are available. A Peacock subscription is required.
Final Verdict
| Category | Score |
|---|---|
| Screenplay | ★★☆☆☆ |
| Direction | ★★★☆☆ |
| Jennifer Garner Performance | ★★★☆☆ |
| Supporting Performances | ★★★☆☆ |
| Production Design | ★★★★☆ |
| Emotional Resonance | ★★☆☆☆ |
| Pacing | ★★☆☆☆ |
| Overall | ★★☆☆☆ (2/5) |
The Five-Star Weekend is a show that will find its audience and satisfy them adequately. For everyone outside that specific audience, it is eight hours of beautiful scenery and wasted potential, a show that treats grief as set dressing, sidelines its best performers in favor of melodrama, and extends a six-episode story to eight because that is what streaming platforms do now.
The Nantucket house is stunning. I would watch a show about the Nantucket house. This particular show about the people inside it needed a sharper script and four fewer episodes.
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Frequently Asked Questions
Q. Is The Five-Star Weekend good?
Ans. It depends on your tolerance for glossy beach drama. The production values are high, Jennifer Garner is committed, and it has a genuine appeal for fans of Elin Hilderbrand’s book and similar women’s fiction adaptations. For viewers hoping for emotional depth and complex character work, it disappoints significantly. My rating: 2 out of 5.
Q. What is the Five-Star Weekend about?
Ans. Hollis Shaw (Jennifer Garner) is a successful food blogger and bestselling cookbook author who suffers a devastating personal loss. To process her grief and reconnect with herself, she invites four women from different stages of her life to spend a weekend at her Nantucket home. The weekend surfaces secrets, strains friendships, and exposes the gaps between how everyone’s life looks and how it actually feels.
Q. Where can I watch The Five-Star Weekend?
Ans. The Five-Star Weekend is streaming exclusively on Peacock. All eight episodes are available. A Peacock subscription is required to access the show.
Q. How many episodes are in The Five-Star Weekend?
Ans. Eight episodes. Each episode runs approximately 45 to 55 minutes. Total runtime is around seven hours.
Q. Is The Five-Star Weekend a movie?
Ans. No. The Five-Star Weekend is a limited series on Peacock, eight episodes based on Elin Hilderbrand’s novel of the same name.
Q. Is The Five-Star Weekend part of a series?
Ans. It is based on a standalone novel by Elin Hilderbrand, who has written many books set on Nantucket. This adaptation is a self-contained limited series covering the events of that specific book.
Q. Who is in the cast of The Five-Star Weekend?
Ans. The series stars Jennifer Garner as Hollis Shaw. The ensemble includes Gemma Chan, Regina Hall, Desi Lydic, Khloe Savini, Harlow Jane, Timothy Olyphant, and Judy Greer.
The Five-Star Weekend is streaming now on Peacock. Eight episodes. The Nantucket cinematography is genuinely lovely. The screenplay is genuinely not.
