The Five Star Weekend Changes a Key Ingredient

Spoilers follow for the Peacock series The Five Star Weekend and the 2023 Elin Hilderbrand novel on which it’s based.

Watching the end of Bekah Brunstetter’s adaptation of Elin Hilderbrand’s The Five-Star Weekend is not unlike reading NYT Cooking when a commenter says they loved the recipe — but also they swapped out a bunch of ingredients, changed the preparation, and turned it from dinner into breakfast. Maybe their version really was good, but with all those tweaks, it’s not the same. Brunstetter’s hyphen-lacking The Five Star Weekend changed the recipe, and the way it wraps things up diminishes the poignancy with which Hilderbrand’s novel approached forgiveness.

The ensemble series about celebrity chef Hollis Shaw (Jennifer Garner), who, grieving after the accidental death of her husband, Matthew (Josh Hamilton), invites four friends from various periods in her life for a restorative weekend at her Nantucket home, is a good hang with lots of fizzy chemistry among Garner, Regina Hall, Chloë Sevigny, D’Arcy Carden, and Gemma Chan. The Five Star Weekend plants its flag in the smooth-brained-adaptation sand and then has Timothy Olyphant’s hot ass, playing Hollis’s hot ex Jack, hotly lean against it. In making the series a more unchallenging watch, though, Brunstetter alters some of the novel’s prickliest bits. The Five Star Weekend goes from being a story about the ways women can forge companionship with those who have wronged them to a story that makes the men in Hollis’s life the crux of her happiness. Garner and Olyphant lean into the Catch and Release reunion, but rewriting Hollis as a woman who has spent years longing for Jack, and removing her capacity for forgiveness in the process, dulls Hilderbrand’s primary theme of what women can offer one another when men aren’t around.

In Hilderbrand’s book, Hollis is a foodie-magazine wunderkind whose passion for cooking and writing were in place well before she married her doctor husband; in the series, Hollis doesn’t have that journalism background and instead uses cooking to avoid genuinely grappling with her emotions. In the book, Hollis’s daughter, Caroline, regrets pigeonholing her mother as a boring perfectionist and realizes Hollis’s love and care raised her while her father was always working; in the series, Caroline flashes back to a fond memory of criticizing her mother with her father, never second-guessing why Matthew thought it was okay to diminish his wife to his teenage daughter. The drama of the series comes from Hollis being a little bit of a villain; The Five Star Weekend nearly suggests that the fame-chasing Hollis deserved Caroline and Matthew’s irritation rather than their support. And because the adaptation refashions Hollis as a keeping-up-appearances megalomaniac for most of its episodes, it then overcorrects her characterization by giving her a you-go-girl ending that undercuts the novel’s larger consideration of Matthew as the true baddie and women like Hollis and Gigi as his victims.

That moment comes at the expense of Gigi (Chan), Hollis’s latest “star” friend. One of the core tensions in both versions of this story is that Hollis’s relationship with Matthew was falling apart because he thought she’d changed since becoming popular. The other primary tension is the truth about Gigi: She isn’t just a random fan of Hollis’s who started innocently chatting with her online after Matthew died. Gigi was Matthew’s mistress, and she purposefully inserted herself into Hollis’s life after he died because she was also in mourning. In the novel, Hilderbrand keeps the affair reveal between Hollis and Gigi and, in that conversation, digs into Hollis’s anger, Gigi’s guilt, and their shared realization that Matthew sucked. He wasn’t wearing a ring when he met Gigi, told her he was divorced, and only came clean about his marriage months in. He lied to Hollis constantly, making up fake conferences to fly around the world and meet Gigi. Hollis remembers Matthew as “bemused” and “annoyed” by her success. Gigi remembers how his final words to her during an over-the-phone breakup were a tacky “be well.” Matthew may have been planning to recommit to Hollis prior to his death, but that didn’t ameliorate his years of disinterest in her career or how he took her for granted as the stable foundation of his domestic life. Hollis and Gigi both loved Matthew, and they were also both betrayed by him. 

That commonality drives Hollis’s decision to let Gigi stay throughout the end of the weekend and to not share the truth about Gigi with her other friends or Caroline. Hilderbrand writes: 

“Hollis takes one breath, then another, and considers the term five-star … It’s one thing to place fresh flowers on a nightstand or create an Instagram-worthy charcuterie board. But what if the five-star experience went deeper? What if it extended to this moment? What if instead of casting Gigi out, Hollis said, Please stay. I may not arrive at a place of grace right away — the pain of the betrayal is still new, shocking — but I will get there eventually, and until then, I’m willing to play through.”

In this passage, Hilderbrand doubles down on her novel as an imagining of what women might do and say when no men are around and as a model for what they can offer one another. Gigi offers Hollis the truth, Hollis offers her grace, and the book emphasizes that acknowledging imperfection can also be healing. Gigi and Hollis don’t quite remain friends, but what they go through during the weekend helps Hollis realize who she wants to be in the next phase of her life — not just someone who values camera-ready, pretty things, but someone who mines deeper affinities with others. 

By the end of the book, Hollis and Jack are quietly easing into a relationship that’s playing out at the speed she wants so they can thoroughly get to know each other again. Jack is an important part of Hollis’s life now, but not the primary source of her happiness; her cooking community, her friendships with Tatum, Dru, and Brooke, and her relationship with Caroline take precedence. In the epilogue, Gigi pilots Hollis’s return flight from Rome with Jack, and “though Hollis and Gigi no longer text … Hollis hopes Gigi has someone new at her side. … It doesn’t matter who it is, as long as Gigi is his number one.” That’s a little treacly, but it aligns with both The Five-Star Weekend’s overall theme of forgiveness being a choice and its characterization of Hollis as someone who reevaluates what she wants out of her relationships and grows as a result.

There are no similarly quiet moments of commiseration between Hollis and Gigi in the series because The Five Star Weekend brings Matthew and Gigi’s relationship out into the open: Brooke (Carden) realizes the affair after seeing a picture of Matthew on Gigi’s phone. She tells Dru (Hall) and Tatum (Sevigny), and eventually they all tell Hollis. And again, changes are made to the novel to mitigate Matthew’s misdeeds and position Hollis as the person at fault. Matthew told Gigi from the beginning that he was married; Matthew felt conflicted and tried to connect with Hollis again, but she was too focused on work; Hollis admits she knew he was cheating but was too afraid to confront him about it. Hollis’s growth arc in the series is about her becoming a person who needs to be assertive instead of avoidant, and in the finale Gigi becomes a target for Hollis’s new self-certainty. Hollis drops her sunny façade and gets real by saying “Fuck you” to Gigi, and when she learns that Matthew was coming back to her before his car accident, the moment is presented as a victory against Gigi. Garner’s voice is at its steeliest all season when Hollis tells Gigi to “never contact me again,” and The Five Star Weekend sends Gigi off in shame.

Unlike in Hilderbrand’s book, where the weekend becomes an opportunity for the women to challenge themselves personally, the series ends the event with a communal feeling of triumph: The interloper Gigi is gone, and the women all have their personalized gift baskets. And part of Hollis’s triumph is her rapidly rekindled bond with Jack, whom the series elevates in the narrative to always be hanging around: running into the women in town, showing Hollis where her breaker box is (something this type-A woman would absolutely know how to find on her own), cleaning her gutters, and eventually falling into bed with her. Their reunion is presented as the key to Hollis moving on with her life because Jack assures her she’s the same person he knew when they were young; Hollis doesn’t actually need to change and become a more thoughtful, openhearted person, as she is in the book to Gigi — not if Jack approves of her. Sleeping with Jack is what gives Hollis the confidence for her “fuck you” response to Gigi, and the series ends with Jack and Hollis walking the beach, her closure secured with a man by her side. In Hilderbrand’s ending, Hollis and Jack get back together, too, but her well wishes for Gigi are essential to her character’s new priorities. Here, Gigi is so much sand to be washed away under her and Jack’s feet.