The concept for the best-selling book The Five-Star Weekend was initially much darker.
In September 2020, author Elin Hilderbrand grabbed a drink at the Nantucket Hotel bar with a visiting writer friend.
“She said, ‘My friend has terminal cancer, and she still feels okay, so she invited her best friends from each phase of her life to come celebrate her while she still feels good,'” Hilderbrand tells Entertainment Weekly.
“So I’m starting to cry, and then she says something like, ‘And not everyone is getting along,'” she adds with a laugh. ‘I go, ‘Oh God, this is a novel!'”
Hilderbrand started writing from that premise — but it was just too sad.
The solution: “I’m going to have [main character Hollis’] husband die,” says the author, who added at a recent panel — moderated by EW editor-in-chief Patrick Gomez during the Nantucket Film Festival — that her ex-husband (who was in the audience) should not read anything into her decision to kill off the spouse.
“It’s, like, one step removed,” Hilderbrand explains of the artistic choice to not put her main character’s health in question.
The result was a 2023 novel that centers on famous food blogger Hollis Shaw, a grieving widow who invites her best friends from different stages of her life — childhood “sis” Tatum, college roommate Dru-Ann, mom group friend Brooke, and social media friend Gigi — to her Nantucket house for a weekend to distract her from her pain.
“Her friends want to be there for her,” Hilderbrand explains, “but they don’t know the other women there, and it’s a crapshoot.”
So is having your work adapted, according to the author.
Hilderbrand — who’s written more than 30 books, largely set in her hometown of Nantucket — says studios started calling after HBO’s adaptation of Liane Moriarty’s Big Little Lies became a hit in 2017.
“That was, I think, the moment Hollywood realized, ‘Okay, you can make a show about middle-aged women and it will be riveting and an enormous success,'” she explains.
But she knows fans weren’t completely thrilled the first time a Hilderbrand novel was adapted.
“The book is more nuanced, with the love story. And a lot of that got cut,” she explains of Netflix’s 2024 murder mystery The Perfect Couple starring Nicole Kidman and Liev Schreiber.
The author thinks her readers “will be happier” with Peacock’s The Five Star Weekend, which she executive produces and says “is a lot closer to the original material.”
That’s likely because among the novel’s fans is series creator and showrunner Bekah Brunstetter, who devoured Hilderbrand’s book in one day when producers Ali Krug and Sue Naegle sent it to her shortly after the writers’ strike ended in 2023.
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“I could instantly see it as a show,” says Brunstetter, whose previous projects include This Is Us and Maid. “I found it to be this incredible combination of lightness and depth, which is really hard to find in a series. I just really believe in TV shows that uplifts but also challenges at the same time.”
All eight episodes of The Five Star Weekend season 1 — starring Jennifer Garner, Chloë Sevigny, Regina Hall, D’Arcy Carden, and Gemma Chan) — are available on Peacock.
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