How ‘The Five Star Weekend’ Could Expand the Book Into a Multi-Season Series

Some stories refuse to stay on the page. The Hollywood Reporter’ s Beyond the Book column explores what happens when books make the leap to screen and beyond — unpacking what stayed, changed, how it was done and why it matters with the creatives who made it.

[This story contains spoilers from the first season of The Five Star Weekend .]

The Five Star Weekend , both the series and the Nantucket girls trip within the show, begins with a detailed itinerary listing such activities as a pajama dance party, shopping in town and dinner at a fancy restaurant, complete with dress codes. But by the end of the weekend, four of the five friends played by Jennifer Garner , Regina Hall , Chloë Sevigny and D’Arcy Carden are wearing pajamas and eating pizza and wine around the kitchen counter after wrestling with their own nuanced personal issues — including ones involving mental health and sexuality. Related Stories Lifestyle Why Liane Moriarty Broke Her Own Rules and Wrote a Sequel to 'Big Little Lies' TV Peacock Greenlights Three-Part 'Wendy Williams Show' Documentary

The shift in clothing and food — on the first night the well-dressed ladies were eating beautifully plated roasted vegetables and a blackberry galette that Garner’s food influencer Hollis Shaw remade because the original was a little burned — reflects how the first season of the Peacock series, recently renewed for season two , depicted the friends’ weekend-long transition from trying to present perfect, put-together images to embracing their messier emotional realities.

“They stop trying to be perceived in a certain way, and they’re just comfortable,” showrunner Bekah Brunstetter tells The Hollywood Reporter of the friends by the end of season one. “By the end of the weekend, they’re just sort of like laid bare, and they no longer have the energy to try and be funny or try and be smart or try and control how they’re being perceived. They just sort of are being together, and that was very much by design.”

By the end of the weekend the women are more honest with themselves and each other and have more fully embraced who they are and what they want.

Speaking about adapting the Elin Hilderbrand novel for TV, Brunstetter said she was struck by how the book deals with the image vs. reality dynamic and how it seemed universally relevant.

“I think it’s something we can all relate to, especially in a world where we’re taking pictures of everything and presenting our lives in a certain way,” Brunstetter tells THR .

The show also lets Hollis more literally attack her well-constructed reality.

“When I started getting to the end of the book, I just thought: She needs to destroy her kitchen,” Brunstetter says. “In the book she doesn’t really have a true breakdown because, of course, it’s a book, right? We’re in her mind more than we are watching her do things with her body. So I just felt like she needs to destroy this gorgeous, perfect kitchen, and her friends need to clean it up for her.”