Five-Star Weekend, a Peacock series out July 9, is about a food influencer Hollis Shaw (Jennifer Garner) who is in need of a new kind of nourishment after her husband Matthew (Josh Hamilton) dies suddenly in a car accident.
In the eight-episode series—adapted from a Elin Hilderbrand novel by the same name—Hollis organizes a girls’ weekend at her house on Nantucket and invites a friend from each stage of her life. But the women also bring their own baggage to the island, literally and figuratively. So does Hollis, who has been hiding that she and Matthew were not happily married in the end.
Here’s a breakdown of each character’s messy back story and the show’s surprisingly happy ending.
A recipe for drama
Five Star Weekend starts on a wintry Massachusetts day, with Hollis in her kitchen talking about how she feels happiest there, cooking and baking for people. In fact, she’s making elaborate Christmas cookies when police officers show up to tell her that her husband has died.
Six months later, Hollis is on The TODAY Show, telling host Jenna Bush Hager that she got into cooking after her mother died and she took charge of cooking for herself and her father. Then she bursts into tears on air while she’s cutting onions, explaining that everything makes her cry after her husband’s death. Afterwards, her publicist suggests she try to work through her grief by inviting some girlfriends over.
Hollis gets to planning a girls’ weekend. But since she hasn’t stayed in regular touch with these women, she doesn’t realize that they are all dealing with major problems of their own.
Dru-Ann Jones (Regina Hall) is a college friend and a sports agent who is under fire for publicly dismissing one of her clients who wanted to take a break from playing soccer to focus on mental health. Throughout the show, she is not only helping Hollis heal her damaged heart, but is also in damage control mode at her job.
Tatum (Chloë Sevigny) is a childhood friend who runs a dry cleaner on the island and is awaiting results from a biopsy on her breast. She feels like Hollis drifted apart from her to socialize with a more upper-class orbit.
Brooke (D’Arcy Carden), a mom friend who lives near Hollis in suburban Wellesley, Mass., is married to a corporate lawyer facing a lawsuit brought by an intern who is accusing him of sexual harassment.
Gigi (Gemma Chan) is a commercial pilot who developed an internet friendship with Hollis after she reached out offering to be a sounding board when Matthew died. She’s the only one who doesn’t know anyone on the trip, so the other friends are trying to figure out how she got invited.
And unbeknownst to Hollis, her own daughter Caroline (Harlow Jane) is flunking out of Amherst College because she misses her father so much. Originally enrolled as a pre-med student to follow in her surgeon father’s footsteps, she is thinking about switching majors, but doesn’t know how to talk to her mom about that or her grief.
Tensions simmering
Hollis is channeling Martha Stewart all weekend, creating an elaborate itinerary that includes five-star meals inside and outside of the home, spa sessions, dance parties, shopping excursions—and even an ice cream truck that rolls up to her house.
Her friends are grumbling that she’d rather play homemaker than open up about how she’s really feeling after Matthew. But whenever they implore her to tell them how she’s really feeling, Hollis is brutally honest about how she feels like she’s hanging on by a thread and insists that she is not trying to hide the pain, but that she really needs a weekend of dance parties and cooking to distract her. In a distraction she doesn’t expect, her ex is on the island, and they have never stopped thinking about each other.
Meanwhile, the girls’ weekend turned out to be a time of self-discovery for Brooke, who realizes she has shrunk her identity to accommodate her husband. Gigi gives her a makeover, and she’s so grateful for the new duds that she kisses Gigi on the lips. She apologizes profusely, and Gigi insists it does not have to be a big deal and that they can move on. But it unearths something deeper in Brooke. Her husband has never satisfied her sexually. And he keeps calling her to make sure she’ll support him through his lawsuit. When Brooke finally asks him if he really did do something inappropriate with the intern, he doesn’t deny anything. So she decides to follow her heart and flirts with a local female tour guide named Sunny, bonding with her over a shared love for history.
The boiling point
During what’s supposed to be a weekend of feasting, Gigi is eaten up by guilt. She had an affair with Matthew, and she hopes to come clean to Hollis on this trip. But before she can tell Hollis herself, Brooke figures it out when she sees a picture of Gigi and Matthew on Gigi’s phone screen.
A heated confrontation follows in a sauna room during the planned spa day—amplified by the weed mints that the women ingested. Gigi admits to Brooke that Matthew was the first person she ever loved and that her online conversations with Hollis helped her feel connected to Matthew after his passing. Meanwhile, Hollis, the baking influencer, is so baked wandering around that she starts seeing Matthew in the spa rooms.
While Gigi tried to tell Hollis the truth about her relationship with Matthew multiple times—even writing her a letter that she never delivers—it’s Brooke who ends up breaking the news to Hollis. In front of an ice cream truck parked outside of Hollis’s house, Brooke blurts out the not-so-sweet truth that Gigi was having an affair with Matthew.
Now the distance Hollis felt with Matthew at the time of his passing makes sense, plus all of Matthew’s planned domestic and international air travel; he was meeting Gigi on her route. She also recalls that he’d get texts from someone named “G,” and he always assured Hollis she was just an OR nurse messaging about work stuff. And now it made sense why Matthew had been driving to the airport when he got into a car accident: he was driving to meet Gigi.
Cooling off
The opening scene of the last episode is a flashback to Hollis’s kitchen in Wellesley, where she is grilling Matthew on why he is going to Paris if the conference he’s supposedly going to is in Berlin. If the viewer did not already see the proof in the pudding, then this scene makes it clear that Matthew was not going to a work conference, but planning to see Gigi.
Hollis questions whether Matthew is really going to a work conference given the timing over the holiday season and calls him out. She acknowledges that she’s been busy with her social media accounts, and their daughter Caroline has moved out to go to college, but insists that they need to try to adapt to the new normal together. Matthew says it’s sad that they need to “try” at all.
The next scene fast-forwards to the present, where Gigi is passed out in a bed in Hollis’s house after a bender. Instead of confessing to Hollis herself, she drank herself into oblivion at a local bar, and Caroline had to carry her back to the house.
Hollis hears a noise outside, and when she walks out, she finds her ex, Jack (Timothy Olyphant) on a ladder cleaning her gutters. He says he noticed they needed maintenance but that’s not the real reason why he came over. She confesses that she’d have dreams about him and wake up sweating next to Matthew. They share a kiss and hook up in Hollis’s bed.
The next morning, Gigi is nowhere to be found, and Jack is cooking her breakfast. Hollis and Jack are talking about how great the prior night was, and Hollis is in the middle of telling Jack how she’s not ready to be in a romantic relationship when Gigi walks in holding a box of morning buns.
Hollis and Gigi retreat to the laundry room to talk in private (though all the friends are listening at the door). Gigi reveals to Hollis that Matthew “was going to choose you.” Before he died, Matthew left Gigi a voicemail saying they needed to talk; Gigi says he was going to break up with her. Hollis looks back at the accident report, which shows that Matthew was driving back toward their house—to Hollis—when he died.
Hollis tells Gigi she will forgive her because she doesn’t want there to be anger between them. She hands her a party favor of toffee with cardamom, her version of an olive branch.
An ending as sweet as honey
Given all of the drama going into the weekend, the show wraps up with happy endings for the characters. The weekend made the women all best friends with one another, and they immediately started brainstorming destinations for another girls’ trip for the same time next year.
When Gigi leaves, Hollis makes everyone pancakes with sad faces drawn on them “because my marriage was a lie.” Then the four women dump Matthew’s comically large stash of protein powder into the ocean.
On the beach, Tatum receives her biopsy report. It’s not good news—the lump doctors found is benign but they find abnormal cells forming behind it. But by the end of the show she is feeling optimistic because she knows she is surrounded by supportive family members—and now the friends she made during the girls’ weekend. Tatum and Hollis share a tender moment over a cigarette in which Hollis vows to call her the next day and stay in touch better.
Brooke is heading home a changed woman. Over the weekend, her husband showed up to Hollis’s house, demanding she come home and even telling their kids that she was trying to break up the family by leaving them. She rightfully tells him to get lost. In an even sweeter turn, she runs into Sunny on the ferry, where they kiss and vow to continue seeing each other on the mainland.
Brooke runs up to Dru-Ann and shares excitedly that she has a girlfriend. Dru-Ann too has had a transformative weekend. She still has her job as a sports agent because it’s revealed that her client pretended to need a break to deal with mental health struggles just so she could watch her boyfriend play basketball. But she resents the way the colleagues at her agency did not support her during the controversy and decides she’s going to quit and launch her own talent agency. She’s always been a surrogate mother to Caroline when Caroline needed someone to talk to, and she feels similarly toward her client Posey. Following this strength—her ability to listen and offer guidance well—feels like the right move for Dru-Ann.
By the end of the show, Hollis is on much better terms with her friends. But perhaps the most important relationship Hollis restored was her relationship with her daughter. Caroline has had a wild time on Nantucket, spending most of the show outside of Hollis’s house hanging out with Tatum’s daughter Aubrey (West Duchovny)…and flirting with a bartender who turns out to be the father of Aubrey’s baby and her on-again-off-again boyfriend. By the end of the weekend, she’s realized that grieving her father will take time. Pushing against her mother isn’t going to help.
Once Hollis learns the truth about Matthew, she is desperate to keep it from Caroline. But Caroline tells her mom that she figured it out anyway. “I’m an adult person with eyes and ears,” she says. She begs her mom not to hide her feelings from her because it makes it hard for her to confide in her—and she wants to confide in her because Hollis is her only parent now.
Hollis turns down a TV appearance to spend more time with Caroline on Nantucket, and the two talk about what’s next for the youngster. Caroline suggests she might want to switch gears from the pre-med track to something in photography. The episode ends with Hollis and Caroline running into Jack during a golden-hour walk on the beach and heading back to her house to eat leftovers.
Overall, it was a messy but clarifying weekend for everyone.
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