By midlife, friends are collected from different seasons. There are people who grew up with us, coworkers from the early stages of our careers, friends we kept after another relationship ended, and friends we met through a hobby, at an event, or in an online forum. Each one sees us through the lens of how we connected; none of them has seen every chapter.
In The Five Star Weekend, a television adaptation of a bestseller by Elin Hilderbrand on Peacock TV, friends from different stages of life come together to support one of their own navigating a personal crisis. Jennifer Garner leads the ensemble cast as Hollis Shaw, an internet-famous baker inviting one close female friend from each chapter of her life for a girls’ weekend in Nantucket. One of the through lines of the show tests whether friendships built on a single chapter hold up under pressure when combined. The other key cast, including Regina Hall, Chloe Sevigny, Gemma Chan, and D’Arcy Carden, are each in the midst of their own midlife challenges, mimicking the reality of any group chat that moves from career pivots to health to questionable relationships. Where they are individually plays as much a role in whether they can form a cohesive supportive group as proximity.
The show presents a version of midlife that some women aspire to: a flexible enough schedule to accept a last-minute weekend invitation. The waterfront homes, restaurants, beaches, and sunsets of Nantucket make it easy to understand why everyone who could accept the invitation did. If someone invited me, I’d go because this is my speed. It raised the question: which of my friends would show up, even if it isn’t their thing? There’s a fine line between a popularity test and support in crisis that isn’t always easy to see, and Hollis is testing exactly that line with her invitation list.
The people who have known us the longest don’t always know the people we’ve become, and the friends we make later in life see us differently. The Five Star Weekend asks whether all of those relationships can exist in the same place at the same time. For most of these characters, the friendships held up.
The more I watched, the more I thought about how lucky Hollis was to have so many women willing to figure it out for her sake. Bringing together friends from different chapters of your life could have backfired in so many more ways than it did. There are certainly stories that weren’t shared, or standing dates for things that worked at one point in time and not in others, and the potential for misunderstandings.
That’s where the series asks viewers to make its biggest leap. Years of resentment begin to soften surprisingly quickly, and a relationship that seemed unlikely to recover makes a full about-face over the weekend, testing the show’s other through line: how much we change and how much we stay the same.
The show also tosses in a cheat on the question of how much we stay the same. Raise your hand if the ex who could have been the love of your life is still in love with you. Keep it up if he aged like a supermodel.
The Five Star Weekend delivers on a female-centered storyline featuring midlife women, a beautiful coastal setting, and drama. Watch it for the plot twists, the cast, or to see what an internet-famous baker’s Nantucket weekend looks like in closeup. Any one of those reasons is enough.
One final thought: this series introduces questions worth sitting with about friendships and who we are. How well do the people who’ve known us the longest really know the women we’ve become? And do we really know anyone unless they let us?
