Big Little Lies-lite? This Jennifer Garner drama is sunnier than expected

The Five-Star Weekend ★★★

From first glance, it’s easy to discount The Five-Star Weekend as the latest ensemble drama trying to riff off Big Little Lies. Both are adapted from hit beach reads, set against a beautiful coastal backdrop, and see an unlikely group of wealthy women band together after a death. This time, our leading ladies are Jennifer Garner, Chloë Sevigny, Regina Hall, Gemma Chan and D’Arcy Carden.

But The Five-Star Weekend is intentionally a much lighter, slighter drama than HBO’s at-times harrowing hit. Avoiding the trope of a mysterious murder, it’s a relatively quaint story by TV’s standards, focused more on character dynamics than shocking twists.

Led by Garner, the show centres on Hollis Shaw, a food influencer whose Instagram-perfect life is punctured by the sudden death of her husband (Josh Hamilton) in a car accident. Six months later, Hollis can’t get through a daytime TV appearance without breaking down into sobs. Needing a break, she reaches out to four friends – each one from a different period of her life – for a weekend getaway at her childhood home on Nantucket, the New England island once a hub for whaling and now a holiday hub for yuppies.

The getaway is more meticulously planned than the most picturesque Pinterest board, and Hollis is determined to stick to her itinerary of artisanal charcuterie boards, luxury spa days, pyjama parties and home-made pizza. If this healing weekend doubles as a content opportunity, so be it.

Her friends, integrally, are not friends with each other at all – a plot point that justifies the somewhat random cast, with perennial it girl Sevigny telling press she took the role so her mum’s friends would finally like something she’s in.

There’s the tough childhood friend (Sevigny), the college friend and heavy-hitting sports agent (Hall), an anxious mum friend (Carden) and a follower (Chan) whom Hollis bonded with over shared grief. The last two are surprised they’re even invited, the others ultra-protective and suspicious of everyone else. All bring their own baggage, from unstable marriages to internet cancellations, health scares and a quickly revealed secret.

Showrunner Bekah Brunstetter has a difficult job setting up five disjointed storylines in the first episode, alongside secondary characters like Hollis’ daughter (Harlow Jane), old flame (Timothy Olyphant) and ex-friend (Judy Greer, criminally underused). It’s an absolute slog, and the show’s cutesy title cards and garish scene transitions – seemingly made using Hollis’ own Canva-pro account – don’t help.

But once The Five-Star Weekend unites its characters, it’s infinitely more interesting, cycling through its subplots with ease as Hollis learns to drop the facade and feel her grief. It could have been much tighter at six episodes instead of eight, but who hasn’t been guilty of stretching out a holiday?

The Five-Star Weekend is streaming on Binge from July 9.

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