‘The Five-Star Weekend’ Review: A Grief Vacation That Never Quite Leaves The Resort

Peacock’s new limited series arrives this week as one of those glossy summer confections built entirely around the promise of beautiful people processing pain in beautiful places. ‘The Five-Star Weekend’ adapts Elin Hilderbrand’s bestselling novel and follows Hollis Shaw, a picture perfect baking influencer played by Jennifer Garner, as she gathers four friends from wildly different chapters of her life for a weekend on the island where she grew up.

The setup arrives six months after Hollis loses her husband, and the show wastes no time establishing the tension between her public persona and her private unraveling. Each friend she invites is dragging her own baggage onto the ferry too, from career threatening scandal to health scares to legal trouble, and the series clearly wants these overlapping crises to spark off one another across eight episodes.

Watching it all unfold, I found myself admiring the craft on the surface far more than I connected with what was happening underneath it. Garner is genuinely the reason to watch this show. She plays Hollis as a woman whose competence has curdled into a coping mechanism, someone who would rather curate a flawless charcuterie board than sit with her own sadness, and there is real nuance in how she lets that mask slip only in small, believable increments.

The supporting cast mostly rises to meet her. Regina Hall brings sharp, defensive energy to a character fighting to protect her career, and D’Arcy Carden quietly steals scenes as the anxious, overly chatty friend nobody quite takes seriously until she needs them to. Chloe Sevigny gets the trickiest assignment, playing someone prickly enough to be genuinely unlikable at times, and she leans into that discomfort rather than softening it for easy sympathy.

Where the show stumbles is in its refusal to let any of that tension actually detonate. Every conflict gets set up with real promise, a betrayal here, a secret there, and then gets resolved so gently and so quickly that it barely registers as drama at all. It plays less like a story about women confronting hard truths and more like a story about women agreeing to be nice to each other before the credits roll.

That pattern becomes the show’s defining flaw. Grief, professional ruin, and old romantic wounds all get introduced with weight and then smoothed over with the efficiency of a vacation itinerary, which is fitting given how obsessively Hollis plans every hour of this trip. The result is a series that looks like it should hit hard and instead settles for a warm, low stakes hangout, more interested in sunset dinners and wardrobe than in genuinely sitting with anyone’s pain.

I don’t think that makes it a bad watch exactly, just a frustrating one, because the talent assembled here is clearly capable of more than what the scripts ask of them. There are individual scenes, particularly anything involving Hollis and her college aged daughter, where the show briefly finds the rawness it seems to be chasing before retreating back into safety. It made me wish the whole series trusted its cast and its premise enough to stay uncomfortable a little longer.

By the time the secrets do come out, the show has already trained you not to expect much fallout from them, and that expectation mostly holds. It is handsomely shot, well cast, and easy to keep playing in the background, but easy is also the ceiling it never breaks through. I walked away entertained in the moment and largely unmoved a day later, which is its own kind of verdict on a show this determined to please.

If you want a breezy, sun drenched hangout with a terrific ensemble and don’t need your melodrama to actually bite, ‘The Five-Star Weekend’ delivers exactly that experience and nothing more. I’m landing at 6.5 out of 10, a show elevated by its cast well past what its safe, conflict averse writing actually earns.

Have you streamed ‘The Five-Star Weekend’ yet, and did Hollis and her friends win you over or leave you wanting more drama? Drop your verdict in the comments below.