I fully fell in love with “The Five-Star Weekend,” a show on Peacock about female friendship at midlife and gorgeous Nantucket vistas, in the middle of the final episode. (Fair warning: Spoilers abound from this point on.) That’s when Hollis — the perfectionistic, repressed heroine who over the course of the series discovers her dead husband was a cheater — and her three close friends dump tubs full of his leftover protein powder in the Atlantic Ocean, backed by the dulcet tones of Natalie Merchant.
This satisfying scene befits the somewhat on-the-nose show, but also displays Hollis’s delayed grief and even rage. Played with sensitive grace by Jennifer Garner, Hollis is a food influencer, who has built her “Hungry With Hollis” brand into a successful and lucrative business. Her late husband, Matthew (Josh Hamilton, shown in flashbacks throughout the series), was a surgeon who never took her work seriously and clearly resented that he was no longer the center of her world.
On the last day of his life, Matthew was making a protein smoothie while subtly putting down Hollis’s profession. Hollis does confront him about his belittling tone, saying, “I have something I’m proud of, I’m building, and you’re making me feel guilty. Admit it, it bothers you.” But ultimately she backs off and apologizes before handing him a homemade sandwich to take on his trip, which she later finds out is to meet his mistress in Paris.
When the show returns to the present, Hollis spies the giant barrel of protein powder hogging valuable shelf space, and she and the three other middle-aged women take that potent symbol of gym-bro, selfish masculinity and fling it out to sea.
But the final episode also made me realize what “The Five-Star Weekend” doesn’t do: humiliate its stars. The friends — Tatum (Chloë Sevigny), Dru-Ann (Regina Hall) and Brooke (D’Arcy Carden) — are given dignity and agency in a way that 40- and 50-something women in other television shows and films are not. Even Matthew’s mistress is treated sympathetically; the show could have chosen to trash her, but it does not.
One of the reasons I did not love the “Sex and the City” reboot, “And Just Like That …,” was that it seemed to relish making its heroines look foolish and made the vagaries of aging seem depressing and disgusting. The best example was in the first season, when Carrie Bradshaw is grieving her dead husband and recovering from hip surgery. Her best friend Miranda is supposed to be helping her, but gets distracted by getting drunk and cheating on her husband in Carrie’s kitchen. Carrie, who cannot get to the bathroom by herself, ends up trying to pee into an empty diet Snapple bottle and winds up wetting the bed.
There were a million other ways the show could have illustrated Carrie’s predicament — she’s depressed and feeling abandoned — but it chose a maximally embarrassing one that was not even very funny.
Another dramatic portrayal that seems to delight in making a woman look horrible is the revenge fantasy “Send Help,” which somehow manages, at least in the first third of the movie, to make the gorgeous 47-year-old Rachel McAdams really gnarly. Her character, Linda Liddle, is a frumpy and overlooked, but highly competent, employee at a consulting firm, and her lack of social and physical grace disgusts her co-workers. There’s one moment in particular, in which Linda is eating a tuna sandwich and it ends up on her face and hand just as her new boss walks by her desk. The caption on an Instagram post about this scene: “Bro was absolutely repulsed.”
I get that this was intentional — the movie is on her side the whole time, the director Sam Raimi loves to gross people out, and Linda does destroy her haters in the end — but I was still put off by just how much delight there was in making a middle-aged woman look so completely pathetic. (And to be crystal clear, “And Just Like That …” was not a good show, while “Send Help” was a great movie.)
All of this brings me back to “The Five-Star Weekend.” Part of the show’s magic is the different life paths that it reveals. Tatum, Hollis’s best friend from their childhood growing up on Nantucket, is spicy and snarky but incredibly loyal. Tatum runs a dry-cleaning business on the island — a middle-class local in a sea of rich swells — and is enamored with her first grandchild. She’s dealing with a potential cancer diagnosis, and sparring with Hollis over class issues. But she never lets Hollis go — she’s completely devoted to her friend and her high-school-sweetheart husband, who loves her for her sharp edges.
Dru-Ann is a sports agent who has prioritized her career, a choice that comes under some scrutiny after she is soft-canceled for riding one of her clients too hard. Dru-Ann’s choices are treated as no less admirable than Hollis’s or Tatum’s. She does not seem particularly sad about not being married or having kids, and has a very close relationship with Hollis’s college-age daughter, who is Dru-Ann’s goddaughter. Brooke, a stay-at-home mom with a jerk of a husband, realizes over the weekend depicted in the show that she is attracted to women. The show ends with her exploring a budding relationship with a tour guide she met on the island, and vowing to figure out a new life for herself.
Of course, “The Five-Star Weekend” is still somewhat of a glossy utopia, fairly removed from most people’s real lives. The interiors of Hollis’s expensive home look plucked from a shelter magazine, and everybody is dressed to the nines. Even Tatum, who is supposed to be the poor relation, lives in a cozy-chic wood-paneled house with ocean views. Even so, the stellar performances of Garner, Sevigny, Hall and Carden make the show feel relatable even when the details aren’t always.
As a woman in her 40s, I found it a relief to be pulled into this beautiful world, where middle age is treated as a positive development — even a potential turning point toward something more authentic. Oh, and also Timothy Olyphant plays the boyfriend that always held a candle for Hollis, and she never stopped thinking about him, either. I watched Olyphant in “Justified,” so I can definitely relate to that.
