The Five-Star Weekend Review: A Two-Star Experience

The term "beach read" can sound like an insult, a description of a novel that is best enjoyed when your brain is already halfway switched off laying on a deckchair beneath the sun. It's a catch-all term that can describe anything from twisty thrillers to steamy romance, a story that can easily hook you in and slide back off as fast as the sand on your feet, and traditionally, it has only been the beach reads with the more gruesome genre aspects that have translated to the screen. There remains a slightly misogynistic snobbery toward populist art created by and for women unless it has the pulpier qualities of a "Gone Girl" or "Housemaid." This is how an author like Elin Hilderbrand, dubbed the "Queen of Beach Reads" back in 2019, can be a best-selling author with dozens of titles to her name, even though only one has a Wikipedia page — and somehow, that isn't the one that was previously made into a Nicole Kidman miniseries ("The Perfect Couple").

After the charming Emily Henry adaptation "People We Meet On Vacation" on Netflix earlier this year — if Hilderbrand is the queen, Henry is the next-in-line to the beach reads throne — it seemed like the streamers had found a way to adapt the glossier, less intellectually demanding of these best sellers without making them feel frivolous. The main difference between that and Peacock's A-list Hilderbrand adaptation "The Five-Star Weekend" is that story wasn't stretched out to miniseries length, and at a punishing eight episodes, a slight, lightly escapist character drama winds up demanding too much of an audience who wanta something that's as easy to go down as the source material. 

It's neither slight enough to have the same impact as it would when read at the beach, or as juicily melodramatic as it needs to be to sustain interest in the turbulent relationships of these formulaic characters; a soap opera with all the soapiness washed off.

Jennifer Garner leads as Hollis Shaw, a food blogger-turned-author reeling over the recent death of her husband. Her publicist demands she take time away from the spotlight, and she opts to heal by reconnecting with friends from four different periods in her life. These are childhood friend Tatum (Chloë Sevigny), who is anxious about a possible cancer diagnosis; college roommate and sportscaster Dru-Ann (Regina Hall) who is being cancelled online for saying a young star is faking a mental health crisis; mom friend Brooke (D'Arcy Carden), whose husband is in the midst of a sexual harassment tribunal; and finally Gigi (Gemma Chan), an online friend she connected with shortly after her husband passed. Those who had previously met already dislike (or at the very least distrust) each other, but all begrudgingly come together to Nantucket for a weekend following Hollis' richly detailed itinerary of rest, relaxation, and more food than you could fill a cookbook with.

It's to the credit of the source material that the series isn't forced into a place where not all the inter-character conflict can be easily patched up by the end, opting to make the audience swallow some bitter pills despite the appearances of calming escapism. Most of this revolves around the group's newcomer Gigi, who has been gently (arguably flatly) characterized by showrunner and lead writer Bekah Brunstetter, refusing to villainize her despite early revelations revealing she might be a sociopath for attending in the first place. 

Various characters are always butting heads over minor inconveniences not even worth wasting the time mentioning here, which makes Chan's unassuming social media mutual with a dark secret the only source of continuing narrative intrigue, the only person onscreen we know is hiding something actually worth arguing about. The series has no interest in playing this up for drama, and so it just lifelessly flails in the background alongside even more underdeveloped and deeply uninteresting conflicts. It doesn't help that Chan is easily the worst actress in an otherwise stellar ensemble, whose bland screen presence struggles to breathe something deeper into a thinly sketched not-quite-villain in the way her castmates would with ease.

Everybody else does their best to elevate the flimsy material, which may be written with more depth than the average beach read, but is equally as hesitant to make its characters complicated or unlikable. Take Dru-Ann, whose professional career is in disarray after her comments disparaging a young athlete with self-diagnosed mental health issues have gone viral; a headline-grabbing controversy in the story that feels lab tested by an author desperate to find the most damaging scandal that won't turn an audience against the character embroiled in it. 

Regina Hall finds the right balance of spikiness and gentleness to her, but the scripts never attempt to match it, possibly too scared that they'd legitimize Dru-Ann's very mildly anti-woke comments if they dwelled on her controversies beyond telling us they exist. There's a similar spikiness to Chloë Sevigny's Tatum, although the series has a better handle on her, characterizing her as a formerly emotionally intuitive person now more likely to push her feelings down — although, if I'm being uncharitable, the internalized nature of her medical anguish also means the series doesn't have to grapple too much with material it's clearly not comfortable with.

D'Arcy Carden's Brooke is given the material that best lives up to the giddily soapy potential of this self-discovery story, with the "Good Place" star mining equal comedy and pathos from a tightly-wound family-woman's dawning realization that she's grown too comfortable in a deeply unhappy marriage. She's not the only good performer here, but is aided by being the only actor working with material that already has depth of character on the page, allowing her to find more space for humor. It's a familiar nervous breakdown arc, but with a more distinct personality than anything else onscreen because the actor doesn't have to strain to make a meal out of the ingredients she's been given.

But this isn't enough to justify a thinly sketched story, which takes place across just four days, stretching out to eight episodes. It's as forgettable and as disposable as the biggest critics of the beach read genre would fear and did the unthinkable: for the first time in my life, it made me wish the weekend would end a lot sooner.

"The Five Star Weekend" premieres on Peacock on July 9.