• by Adam Buckman , Featured Columnist, 8 hours ago

An old friend generously invites four of her best friends and one other guest for a wonderful summer weekend in Nantucket at her fabulously beautiful oceanfront home.

The woman, played by Jennifer Garner (above photo) in the new Peacock drama “The Five Star Weekend,” spends countless hours preparing -- cleaning the huge house herself, shopping for food and wine, cooking, baking and arranging platters of fruit and artisanal cheeses.

She’s a bit of a Martha Stewart type -- a do-it-yourself caterer, you might say -- who is very successful doing much the same thing that Stewart became famous for.

By all appearances, she is hospitable and loving. Plus, she is still very much in mourning following the death of her husband in a sudden accident six months earlier.

Adapted from a bestselling 2023 novel of the same name by Elin Hilderbrand, “The Five Star Weekend” TV series has “hit” written all over it.

The show has been described in the entertainment media as “highly anticipated,” probably because of its association with the novel and its lead actress, who is one of those personalities about whom no one has anything bad to say.

The title of the show appears to have two meanings. One refers to the quality that the perfectionist lead character, Hollis Shaw, hopes to achieve with this get-together -- a five-star experience like a high-end hotel or spa resort.

It also might refer to the five female guests. Four of them are drawn from four different phases of her life. These four are “stars” of Hollis’s life, each representing a part of her life story.

The fifth is an outlier, however. She is an airline pilot and fan who maintains frequent contact with Hollis on social media. But Hollis does not really know the woman, and her close friends are apprehensive.

The rest of the cast of “The Five Star Weekend” includes Chloë Sevigny, D’Arcy Carden, Regina Hall, Gemma Chan, Harlow Jane (daughter of Patricia Arquette and Thomas Jane) as Hollis’ college-age daughter, and Timothy Olyphant as Hollis’s first love.

“The Five Star Weekend” starts streaming on Thursday (July 9) on Peacock.