The Five-Star Weekend: Familiar comfort is the point of this escapist drama

For years now, every time there’s a female-led prestige TV show, someone has been murdered or has disappeared. Call it the Big Little Lies effect, and it’s exhausting.

The consequence of a decade of that sameness is a flattening of a genre, and a scepticism whenever you’re confronted with a series that ticks those boxes — marquee names, high-end production values and usually adapted from a bestselling book you can, invariably, buy at an airport.

It’s as if Hollywood producers think women aren’t interested in stories without a melodramatic crime.

Thankfully, The Five Star Weekend is not that. It really can’t be over-emphasised what a relief it is to not have to muddle through the red herrings and “shocking” revelations of an arch upper-middle-class mystery.

Someone has died though, but it was a clear-cut car crash, and there is one disclosure that propels a central conflict. Still, no detecting! Woo-hoo!

Just a good, old-fashioned character drama that’s an easy and escapist watch. It’s not trying to do too much.

Jennifer Garner leads this stacked ensemble of Chloe Sevigny, Regina Hall, Gemma Chan, D’Arcy Carden, Timothy Olyphant. Judy Greer and Harlow Jane, all bringing a different but synchronous energy to the series. It’s a really well cast show, and that’s a big part of why it works as well as it does.

Garner plays Hollis Shaw, a food blogger whose husband Matthew (Josh Hamilton) died six months earlier in an accident.

She’s still in the throes of grief and decides to invite four friends from different eras of her life to her holiday home in the well-off island enclave of Nantucket for a three-day weekend.

There’s Tatum (Sevigny), her childhood friend who still lives on the island, Dru-Ann (Hall), a type-A sports agent she befriended in university, Brooke (Carden), an anxious mum friend from her neighbourhood, and Gigi (Chan), one of her followers she connected with after Matthew’s death.

Every woman is dealing her own stuff. Tatum is waiting on biopsy results, Dru-Ann is being cancelled by the internet, Brooke has a terrible husband who’s being sued for sexual harassment at work, and Gigi is also grieving a death.

You put them all together with Hollis, who finds distraction and repression by trying to make everything perfect, from the welcome gift baskets and the curated and calligraphy-ed itinerary to her emotional wellbeing, and fights, and old resentments and secrets will erupt.

As a character, Hollis has familiar shades in fiction. She’s a control freak who struggles to confront the internal turmoil, and discovers some things she probably already knew. We know this character, but Garner’s portrayal is very sympathetic – she brings a natural warmth and relatability.

The rest of the cast are also great, and even though they are all playing archetypes, there are enough small distinctions to make those characters their own, and the series manages to capture the different and shifting dynamics of friendships over the years.

Familiarity is the point. The Five-Star Weekend isn’t really trying to mark new ground or challenge the audience, and that’s perfectly OK as long as you do it well, which this series does.

It’s a cosy world of beautifully comfortable textures, both in the storytelling and the production design. Everywhere you look, there’s a gorgeous piece of furniture, a gabled roof or a grassy sand dune. It’s like walking through a Pottery Barn display room, a bit of lifestyle porn.

But because the performances are good, the writing is good and it looks good, it’s all good. By the end of the series, you will wind up caring about these people.

The always obvious caveat being, yes, absolutely, The Five-Star Weekend could’ve been a movie instead of an eight-episode series, but you’re also not mad that it isn’t.

The Five-Star Weekend is on Binge from July 9