Jennifer Garner Delivers an All-Time Great Performance in 'The Five-Star Weekend' | Review

Within the first ten minutes of The Five-Star Weekend, Hollis Shaw (Jennifer Garner) learns that her husband has died in a car accident just before Christmas, and then she excuses herself to take the candy cane meringue kisses out of the oven. This tells you everything about Hollis before the show has to. She is a woman so committed to the performance of perfection that even the worst news of her life has to wait for the kitchen timer.

It also tells you that Peacock knows exactly who is watching. The mothers of America want their kitchen porn served warm, with a side of catastrophe, and Bekah Brunstetter's adaptation of Elin Hilderbrand's 2023 beach-read juggernaut delivers it by the tray. Let us be clear before anyone accuses us of getting fooled by a Le Creuset collab. The Five-Star Weekend is comfort food that knows it's comfort food, an eight-episode drama that runs on quartz countertops, Nantucket seascapes, and the fantasy that your grief could also look this good in French linen.

It’s also… kind of wonderful. Why? Because it’s got an unfairly talented cast (Regina Hall, D’Arcy Carden, Chloë Sevigny, and Gemma Chan) playing five women whose separate storylines each feel fully built instead of sketched in around Garner. And it’s smart enough to deploy Timothy Olyphant as the bit of perimenopausal eye candy required to periodically break up the estrogen fest. Come for the cottagecore and stay because Garner and her four co-stars keep sneaking real feeling into the gaps between browning scallops and slightly burnt blackberry tarts.

'The Five-Star Weekend' Is Proof That Jennifer Garner Makes Any Show Better

When we meet Hollis again, six months after her husband’s funeral, she’s done the modern-widow thing of turning a very private catastrophe into content. The small catering operation she once ran has ballooned into a full-blown brand: cookbooks, TODAY show appearances, an assistant, the kind of career that requires her to smile through an onion dip demo as she jokes about the worst day of her life for the camera. Every Hadid with an air fryer is coming for her influencer crown, and her agent has decided that the solution to a grief-stricken retreat from promotional life is to post more content, ideally shot over a luxury weekend with her closest friends.

Garner is doing something really tricky here, and she makes it look so easy. Hollis has to be a woman playing the tradwife dream while crumbling inside, and Garner lets you see both layers at once. She has always been irresistibly likable, and she puts that to work here. Even when you want to pull your hair out over her character's refusal to face the uglier parts of her own healing, you still just want to give her a hug. Hollis is allowed to be a mess – allowed to plan what is essentially a grief intervention for herself and then ask her spiraling daughter to document it all for the ‘gram – because of Garner’s irresistible charm, and it’s hard to imagine this show working with anyone but her in the role. Hers is the rare influencer character who feels like a person rather than a punchline.

The Genius of 'The Five-Star Weekend' Is Its 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, frankly, 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, which is 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, as it is, isn’t as fulfilling as she always believed. She toggles between the two effortlessly, easily the funniest woman on screen even amongst 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 a 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 that the reveal rewrites everything you thought Hollis' unhappiness was about.

'The Five-Star Weekend' Is 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 what we can only describe as 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 with board and batten-detailed colonials that will send Pinterest into cardiac arrest. The fourth episode, a spa day that goes gloriously sideways thanks to some weed gummies and the arrival of Judy Greer's poisonous frenemy, is the season at its most purely enjoyable.

Does The Five-Star Weekend get overstuffed? Absolutely. There are a lot of arcs, and a few threads, particularly the daughter Caroline's (Harlow Jane) island romance, feel like they belong to a different show. The men are mostly furniture, though Olyphant, as the high school sweetheart Hollis never quite got over, understands he's in a fantasy and leans in with the correct amount of salt-and-pepper charisma. But it works, dammit. It cuts the hard stuff about getting older with enough genuine comedy that even the sappy beats go down as easy as one of Hollis's recipes. In other words, the moms are going to go feral for this one. And you know what? We get it.

The Five-Star Weekend premieres July 9 with all eight episodes on Peacock.