Why a show about grief might be the ‘comfort watch’ of the summer

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Washington Post

Emily Yahr, The Washington Post

Published Jul 11, 2026  •  7 minute read

The cast of 'The Five-Star Weekend.' Photo by Peacock

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Jennifer Garner has more than 17 million followers on Instagram, but a couple of times, the actress has found herself exchanging surprisingly candid messages with people she has never met before in her life.

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“Total strangers that I’ve just bonded with for whatever reason,” Garner told The Washington Post in a video interview. She theorized that because she doesn’t know them, it actually might be easier to tell them things that she would normally only share with close friends. “You know what I mean.”

Who wouldn’t? The desire for human connection can lead to unexpected places, which is a theme that fuels “The Five Star Weekend,” the TV series that premiered Thursday on the W Network and is based on Elin Hilderbrand’s popular 2023 novel. Garner plays Hollis, a hugely successful cooking influencer who is mired in grief six months after her husband died in a car accident, and is struggling to figure out how to move forward.

So she decides to host the ultimate distraction and invites four pals, one from each phase of her life, to her beachfront mansion in Nantucket, Massachusetts, for a girls’ trip. This includes her prickly childhood friend, Tatum (Chloë Sevigny); her self-confident college friend, Dru-Ann (Regina Hall); and her sweet-yet-awkward mom friend, Brooke (D’Arcy Carden). The fifth woman rounding out the “five stars” is someone who Hollis has never met but has deep conversations with online: The kind and mysterious Gigi (Gemma Chan), one of her millions of social media followers.

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Garner can relate to this Instagram friend phenomenon, though in this case, Gigi is keeping a big secret, and she’s not the only one. All the women arrive at the Nantucket estate with baggage, literal and figurative, which drives the carefully plotted twists that unspool over all eight episodes. Exploring the complexities of grief and friendship drew Garner to the role, along with a stacked cast and the juicy source material.

“The thing about Elin’s books, they’re incredibly adaptable because the characters are fully drawn. … We were able to get a cast like that because all of their stories have a beginning, a middle, an end, and are rich, difficult, complicated stories,” said Garner, who also served as an executive producer. “As much as you think, like, ‘Oh, this is a little bit of an archetype of a character here,’ and ‘This might be what I expect,’ I guarantee: If you watch the show, if you read the book, it’s going to surprise you.”

Hilderbrand, the best-selling author of more than 30 novels since 2000 with a loyal fanbase known as the “Hilderbabes,” loves a good surprise. She has been dubbed “queen of the beach read” for her page-turners that are almost always set amid the gorgeous island scenery of Nantucket. She dives into human nature and relationships with stories of soulmates and lifelong friends – but plotlines also feature torrid affairs, shocking deaths, illness, criminal activity, betrayals, maybe a murder or two. Grief is a common theme, but it’s frequently balanced out by humor, and the series does the same.

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“When you’re thinking about, ‘Well, is it a drama or is it comedy?’ It is both. And you know what else? Real life is both. And so that’s what I love about the show,” Hilderbrand told The Post. “I think it’s a lighthearted drama, because it has a surface energy that is a little bit lighter than the things that are lying beneath it.”

She was inspired to write “The Five Star Weekend” in 2020 when she heard about a Nantucket woman with terminal cancer who invited her closest friends from each era of her life to spend the weekend. Hilderbrand thought this was incredibly poignant, and a lightbulb went off: “Oh my God, that’s a novel.” Initially, she started her draft with a main character who was dying, but it was too devastating. So she changed the death to the character’s husband, and anchored the plot in Hollis’s search for meaning when her world is upended.

Hilderbrand understands how seriously fans take the TV versions of beloved books. This is her second adaptation (she has seven or eight more in development) after Netflix’s star-studded “The Perfect Couple” in 2024. About four years ago, Hilderbrand had a meeting with Peacock executives who said they were looking for “elevated content for women.” The following year, she got a call saying that the streaming service wanted to turn “The Five Star Weekend” into a series.

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She soon connected with Bekah Brunstetter, the show’s creator who would run the writers’ room. The author didn’t see any scripts in advance besides the pilot, and remains thrilled that the series stays close to the original story, with some changes that make the plot more palatable for TV. One of her favorite new additions is an episode where the five women go to a spa and have an intense bonding experience.

“I feel like this will become people’s comfort watch, which makes me happy,” Hilderbrand said.

After Brunstetter was approached to produce the series, she read the novel and became captivated. “I know how ferocious her fans are,” Brunstetter said in an interview. “It was really important to me to give them the treat of staying as close to the book as I possibly could.”

Brunstetter is also aware of how many readers use Hilderbrand’s universe as a brief escape when they’re going through difficult times. She has heard stories about women reading the books waiting next to their parents’ deathbeds, or in the neonatal intensive care unit with their premature babies. When Brunstetter started working on the series, she attended a family reunion and went into a room belonging to her aunt, who had recently lost her husband and son. One of Hilderbrand’s books was sitting on her bed.

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Now, she hopes the series will serve as a similar measure of comfort. “We’re all reading these kind of books that give us a sense of of joy, while also being about real things,” Brunstetter said. “And I feel like it’s so nice to give a show like this into the world right now.”

A major aspect of Hilderbrand’s books is food, and not to fear, the series features glamour shots of charcuterie boards, Hollis’s famous roasted red onion dip, and fresh, mouth-watering seafood. Hilderbrand said that she, Garner and Brunstetter bonded over cooking for their families and food being their love language.

“We went to Jen’s house recently and she made us lunch, like this beautiful lunch that she whipped up for us,” said Carden, sitting alongside Chan for a video interview with The Post. “It’s a gift that you can give people … when somebody makes you a meal, that’s like pure love.”

Creating the meals that appear in the show were an important aspect of nailing the chic and cozy vibe of Nantucket, a character itself in any Hilderbrand novel. The cast spent last September filming on the island, an experience that they describe as “summer camp with group dinners and boat trips. Garner attended local church and yoga – as well as three lectures at the Whaling Museum, something that even Hilderbrand has never done in her decades living there. (Garner: “I loved those lectures. If I were there, I’d go to a fourth and a fifth and a sixth.”)

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“We were so lucky,” Chan said; the residents were very welcoming to the camera crews and Hollywood A-listers invading their small town. “We got to go there after the summer crowds had mostly gone away. … The weather was perfect and we kind of took over the island.”

Chan was cast as Gigi not long after Garner signed on. Meanwhile, Carden landed her role right before filming started. Carden assumed that meant another actress had dropped out at the last minute, but later learned that producers genuinely could not figure out the right fit for Brooke, who seems like a pushover yet has a steely reserve.

All the characters have complex inner lives, which heightens the show’s risky central endeavor of mixing friend groups during a “five star weekend.” But it’s also a way for people to learn more about themselves, something the producers hope that viewers reflect on as they watch the show.

“Sometimes you’re sort of highlighting a different piece of your nature depending on the friendship that you’re in, right? … So it does make you very existential. ‘Who am I to this person? Who am I to that person?'” Brunstetter said. “It’s a cool thing to do. And we really hope that people start doing it, that we inspire a bunch of trips.”

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