1 day ago
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The Five-Star Weekend is the perfect beach watch, adapted by Bekah Brunstetter from the perfect beach read of the same name by bestselling beach‑read author Elin Hilderbrand. It blends schmaltz, melodrama, jokes and genuine feeling in perfect proportions throughout its eight episodes. It is escapist entertainment that contains, in its tale of five female friends unwinding and spilling secrets over a faultlessly curated long weekend in Nantucket, absolutely nothing to distress us. Come on in, it says warmly with every gorgeous shot of island coastline, the water’s lovely.
The weekend is organised by a tradwife-inflected culinary influencer, Hollis (Jennifer Garner), who has recently lost her husband, Matthew (Josh Hamilton), in a car crash. This all happens off screen; after the police arrive at the house to break the news, we cut swiftly to six months later. It’s the equivalent of a children’s book killing off the parents without a backward glance so the fun can begin.
We meet Hollis’s publicist, Chelsea (Vella Lovell), who is brash but caring; everyone in the show gets two attenuating adjectives to embody on screen. Chelsea is concerned that her client-friend has not totally recovered from the sudden death of her husband and father of her child.
She advises her, as we all surely would, to pick a friend from each phase of her life and spend three days with them at her holiday home so she can return healed and ready to start shilling her new cookbook. Off Hollis trots to start choosing colour palettes and tablescaping. Much as I am hoping to come back in my next life as an affluent American, it does seem like an awful lot of work.
Among the guest list is her childhood friend Tatum (Chloë Sevigny) – abrasive but good-hearted – who is waiting to hear the results of a breast biopsy on Monday and needs the distraction. Then there’s her college mate Dru-Ann (Regina Hall), a hard-bitten sports agent with a zest for life, who competes with Tatum over who knows Hollis best. (I don’t know why. Hollis is a drip whose adjectives are “wet and drippy, but sweet”. She gets three because she’s the star.) Dru‑Ann is in the process of being cancelled by those who have taken umbrage at her bracing words to a doleful young client that were captured on camera.
Third in the gang is Brooke (D’Arcy Carden, as irrepressibly funny as she was in The Good Place), a pal gathered during the days of early motherhood. Brooke is nervy but endearing and we do not like her controlling husband, who has only just let her come for the weekend without him.
Finally, there’s Gigi (Gemma Chan), a pilot and social media follower of Hollis with whom she got chatting in the early days of widowhood for reasons that are unclear. This weekend is the first time the two have met in the flesh. Gigi is mysterious and British. She is also very interested in photos of Matthew and keeps hiving off into different rooms to moon mournfully over them. You almost begin to wonder if Hollis’s marriage wasn’t quite as perfect as her online accounts would have her fans believe.
Her daughter, Caroline (Harlow Jane), a medical student who doesn’t think her mom is responding correctly to her grief, also turns up. Throw Hollis’s first love, Jack, on to the island, and have him played by Timothy Olyphant, and the stage is set for a weekend of emotional support and sexual reawakening for Hollis, drinking, raucous sex talk (about pegging, mostly), revelations, more revelations and a widening of the emotional support circle to include everyone, before a tidy resolution. Then we can all go back to our drab, mansionless lives feeling a little better and a little worse than we did before.
It’s beautiful to look at. While there may be nothing new in the narrative, it still feels refreshing to watch a group of female characters and actors of a certain age being assembled and given the run of themselves – and to have it done in a story that doesn’t require one of them to be murdered, or all of them to become murder suspects after the corpse of someone they all hate is washed up on a beach.
The Five-Star Weekend is not a five-star show, but it is the pleasantest three-star time you could wish for.
