July 12, 2026 — 5:55amIn The Five-Star Weekend, actress Jennifer Garner plays a food blogger who embarks on a journey through her grief by inviting four friends, from different chapters of her life, to her summer home in Nantucket, the Cape Cod-adjacent little American town known for pristine beaches, cobblestone streets and its iconic lighthouse.In a sense it’s a living postcard, a walking, talking series about food and its collective healing power, but it’s also a series about friendship, posturing and the way in which we create avatars of ourselves to signal success and achievement while concealing our pain and grief, even from those who are close to us.Jennifer Garner as Hollis Shaw in The Five-Star Weekend.Seacia Pavao/PeacockFirst, though, the food. It’s a big deal in The Five-Star Weekend. So much so that most of the media writing about the series dives deep into the layers of its food elements. Hollis Shaw is a kind of younger women’s Martha Stewart, a blogger whose expertise in the kitchen has turned her into a kind of culinary everywoman, with flair.The reality of 2026, however, is a world of home delivery apps and supermarket prepared meals. In losing our ability to prepare food in the traditional sense, Garner tells me, we are tampering with something very fundamental to our nature. “We’ve started to just lose sight of how simple it is to crack an egg in a frying pan and just swirl it right there with a little oil and just with a spatula,” she says. “You have done it. You’ve done the trick.”We’ve also made it too easy to outsource our food, losing both the place of the kitchen as the hearth of the home – a tonal note which seems to play through The Five-Star Weekend – and also one of the key skills of human survival.“I’m grateful that there is so much good food available, but the waste that goes into the amount of boxes, the amount of carbon that’s eaten up by driving food from one place to another, when that same thing could be made on your stove in 10 minutes or less and for a fraction of the cost, truly makes me nuts,” Garner says.The Five-Star Weekend features (from left) D’Arcy Carden as Brooke, Regina Hall as Dru-Ann, Chloë Sevigny as Tatum, Jennifer Garner as Hollis and Gemma Chan as Gigi.Joining Garner’s Hollis Shaw on the weekend are her best childhood friend Tatum (Chloë Sevigny), former college roommate Dru-Ann (Regina Hall), adult best friend and mother’s group peer Brooke (D’Arcy Carden) and Gigi (Gemma Chan), a woman she has befriended in the course of her work as a blogger.Reading Hilderbrand’s 2023 novel, on which the series is based, Garner found Hollis Shaw to be puritanically clear about her idea of right and wrong, and holding herself to her values. “She’s someone who came from, quote unquote, the wrong side of the tracks and through education, gone to a good college, had left the island on which she’d grown up and grown beyond her station.“[So much so that] she didn’t want to go back,” Garner adds. “She liked it. She wanted to look the part. She wanted people to see her as that part. I think it’s part of why she ends up being successful in a world of aspiration online because she had come from something and had aspired to be something, achieved it and knew that feeling and knew how to tap into that feeling for her audience.”As a character, Hollis Shaw is worlds away from super-spy Sydney Bristow, whom Garner played in Alias, or teenager-turned-magazine editor Jenna Rink in 13 Going on 30. Garner’s performance as Marvel anti-heroine Elektra in Daredevil, Elektra and Deadpool & Wolverine, and her compelling portrayal of adoptive mother Vanessa Loring in Juno, testify to her range.Jennifer Garner in a scene from The Five-Star Weekend.Greg Gayne/Peacock.But none of those women were discarded easily, the 54-year-old Texas born actress says. So they are, in effect, ghosts in the machine? “Of course,” Garner says. “Some have stamped me more than others. Sydney Bristow definitely taught me so much, [and] became very much a part of my evolution into adulthood. Confidence – not because the show was successful, although I’m sure that was part of it – [but] what being physically assured taught me and created in me.”And now Hollis Shaw, “who made me want to reinvest in my cooking so that I could learn to be the kind of cook that she is if I want to be”, Garner says. “It’s not my skill set. I don’t make things that are pretty. I make things that are grub and good, but I think she does both. And I think I would love to perfectly follow a recipe to a T so that it turns out with just the right crust.”Though much is made of any setting in television and film – think New York in Sex and the City, Baltimore in The Wire or the Pacific North-west in Twin Peaks – there is a genuine spirit of place in Nantucket, where The Five-Star Weekend is set. “The intangibles are the quality of the light, the feeling of the ocean, the rich history,” Garner says.“You have a sense of that history as you walk around and there are plates on the doors of the houses saying what year they’re from, [and] the captain that lived there,” Garner adds. “You are surrounded by ‘widow’s walks’, on top of houses, that were used for the purpose that they were intended, for these women to watch for their husbands, their sons: Are they coming home?”The locals, too, were “so open to us and were so welcoming to us, partially because they all love Elin Hilderbrand [who lives in the town]. She’s like a mayor of Nantucket. They like being seen. They appreciated that we were there and that we were using the whole island. And they loved seeing us out and about on our bikes, enjoying ourselves and really eating up everything that the island had to offer.”The Los Angeles sound stages where the residential interiors were recreated have their own spirit of place too, Garner adds. “The home of filmmaking, the tradition of filmmaking passed down in families,” she says. “I will be with a special effects artist and I’ve worked with his son and I’ve worked with his father, or I will be with a grip and I knew his father 30 years ago when I was first starting out. That feeling is so rich.”Leaving the role was, as with all her roles, difficult, Garner says, though she notes the series’ press tour is still underway, and the bond between the women who starred in it still very tight.“I mourn moving on from a job,” she says. “There are pictures of me after my first musical, which was Barnum. I was 12. I’d been in ballets since I was three in my little town, but my local community theatre, the first show that I did was Barnum. And there are pictures of me on closing night backstage just a wreck, just crying and crying and crying. And I think that I still feel that loss.”And her Five-Star Weekend co-stars? “We still have a group text chain that is very active and is incredibly supportive,” Garner says. “There’s a sense of humour amongst all of us. Different ones of us take the lead, or lead different parts of it at different times. But these are ladies that I know have my back and that 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.”The Five-Star Weekend airs on Binge and Foxtel On Demand.Find out the next TV, streaming series and movies to add to your must-sees. Get The Watchlist delivered every Thursday.From our partners