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IN Five star weekendActress Jennifer Garner plays a food blogger who embarks on a journey through her grief, inviting four friends from different periods of her life to her summer home in Nantucket, a small American town near Cape Cod known for its pristine beaches, cobblestone streets and famous lighthouse.
In some ways, it’s a living postcard, a walking and talking series about food and its collective healing power, but it’s also a series about friendship, posturing, and how we create our avatars to signal success and achievement while hiding our pain and grief, even from those closest to us.
Jennifer Garner as Hollis Shaw in Five Star Weekend.Sisia Pavao/Peacock
But first, food. It’s a big deal in Five star weekend. So much so that most media outlets writing about the series dive deep into the layers of its food elements. Hollis Shaw is a kind of young feminine Martha Stewart, a blogger whose experiences in the kitchen have turned her into something of a culinary woman with talent.
However, the reality of 2026 is a world of home delivery apps and supermarket ready meals. By losing the ability to prepare food in the traditional sense, Garner tells me, we are tampering with something very fundamental to our nature. “We started to just lose sight of how easy it is to crack an egg in a frying pan and just stir it with a little oil and a spatula,” she says. “You did it. You did your job.”
We’ve also made it easier to outsource food, losing both the kitchen and the hearth – a tonal note that seems to play through Five star weekend – and also one of the key skills of human survival.
“I’m grateful that there is so much good food out there, but the waste that goes into the number of boxes, the amount of carbon that goes into shipping food from one place to another when the same thing can be cooked on your stove in 10 minutes or less and for a fraction of the cost, really drives me crazy,” Garner says.
“Five Star Weekend” stars (from left) D’Arcy Carden as Brooke, Regina Hall as Dru-Anne, Chloë Sevigny as Tatum, Jennifer Garner as Hollis and Gemma Chan as Gigi.
Over the weekend, Garner’s Hollis Shaw will be joined by her childhood best friend Tatum (Chloë Sevigny), her former college roommate Drew-Ann (Regina Hall), her mother’s adult best friend and bandmate Brooke (D’Arcy Carden), and Gigi (Gemma Chan), a woman she befriended during her time as a blogger.
While reading Hilderbrand’s 2023 novel on which the series is based, Garner found Hollis Shaw to be puritanically clear about her ideas of right and wrong and sticking to her values. “She came, quote unquote, from the wrong side of the tracks and, after getting an education, went to a good college, left the island where she grew up and grew beyond her situation.
“(So much so that) she didn’t want to come back,” Garner adds. “She loved it. She wanted to look the part. She wanted people to see her in that role. I think that’s one of the reasons why she ended up being successful in the online aspiration world, because she came from something and aspired to something, achieved it, knew that feeling and knew how to use that feeling for her audience.”
As a character, Hollis Shaw is a far cry from the superspy Sydney Bristow that Garner played. Nicknameor Jenna Rink, who became a teenage magazine editor. 13 Soon 30. Garner’s performance as Marvel anti-heroine Elektra in Daredevil, Elektra And Deadpool and Wolverineand her convincing portrayal of adoptive mother Vanessa Loring in Junoindicate its range.
Jennifer Garner in a scene from the movie Five Star Weekend.Greg Gain/Peacock.
But none of these women were easy to give up, says the 54-year-old Texas-born actress. So they’re basically ghosts in the machine? “Of course,” says Garner. “Some have impressed me more than others. Sydney Bristow definitely taught me a lot (and) was a big part of my evolution into adulthood. Confidence – not because the show was successful, although I’m sure that was part of it – (but) what it taught me and created in me was physical confidence.”
And now Hollis Shaw, “who made me want to invest in my cooking again so I could learn to be the kind of cook she is if I wanted to,” Garner says. “That’s not my skill set. I don’t make pretty things. I make things that taste good and taste good, but I think she does both. And I think I’d like to follow the recipe perfectly to a T and get just the right crust.”
Although on television and in films much is made of any setting – think of New York in Sex and the CityBaltimore in Wire or the Pacific Northwest in Twin Peaks – Nantucket has a real spirit of the place where Five star weekend installed. “The intangibles are the quality of the light, the feel of the ocean, the rich history,” Garner says.
“You get a sense of this history when you walk around and there are signs on the doors of the houses saying what year they were (and) the captain who lived there,” adds Garner. “You are surrounded by ‘widow’s avenues’ on the roofs of houses, which were used for their intended purpose so that these women would watch their husbands, their sons: are they coming home?”
The locals have also been “so open to us and so welcoming, partly because they all love Elin Hilderbrand (who lives in town). She’s like the mayor of Nantucket. They love being seen. They appreciate that we were there and used the whole island. And they loved seeing us on our bikes, having fun and really eating everything the island has to offer.”
Garner adds that the Los Angeles sound stages, where residential interiors were recreated, also have their own spirit of place. “The home of filmmaking, the tradition of filmmaking runs in families,” she says. “I’ll be with the special effects artist, and I’ve worked with his son, and I’ve worked with his father, or I’ll be with the acumen, and I knew his father 30 years ago when I was starting out. The feeling is so rich.”
Leaving the role, as with all her roles, was difficult, Garner says, although she notes that the show’s press tour is still ongoing and the bond between the women who starred in it is still very close.
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“I’m sad about leaving my job,” she says. “There are photographs of me after my first musical, which was Children. I was 12. I had been doing ballet since I was three years old in my small town, but at my local community theater the first show I did was Children. And there are photographs in which I am just a wreck behind the scenes of the final evening, just crying and crying and crying. And I think I still feel that loss.”
And her Five star weekend co-stars? “We still have a group text message chain that is very active and incredibly supportive,” Garner says. “We all have a sense of humor. Different of us take the lead or lead different parts of it at different times. But it’s the women who I know have my back and who see me in a way that I don’t think I’ve been seen at work in a long time. I love them. I really do.”
Five star weekend airs on Binge and Foxtel On Demand.
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Michael Idato is the chief culture editor of The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age.Connect via X or e-mail.