Loved ‘The Five Star Weekend’? Watch these 4 dramas next
Loved ‘The Five Star Weekend’? Watch these 4 dramas next
From Tina Fey’s ‘The Four Seasons’ to Mike White’s ‘The White Lotus,’ these shows explore what happens when people leave normal life behind.
“The Five Star Weekend” on Peacock brings Jennifer Garner to Nantucket with a seriously great group of actors. She plays Hollis Shaw, a famous cook and author who has a very public breakdown after her husband Matthew suddenly dies. Six months later, Hollis invites four women from completely different parts of her life to spend a weekend at her beach house, played by Regina Hall, Chloë Sevigny, D’Arcy Carden, and Gemma Chan. Add in Timothy Olyphant as Hollis’ old flame, plenty of food and wine, and secrets that refuse to stay buried, and this isn’t exactly the relaxing reunion anyone expected. Now that all the episodes are out and the vacation (for now) is over, here are the four relationship dramas to watch next if you loved “The Five Star Weekend.”
The Five Star Weekend
After her husband’s unexpected death and a very public breakdown, famed cook Hollis hosts her best friends for an elaborate weekend on Nantucket.
If you loved the friendship reunion, watch: ‘The Four Seasons’
Tina Fey knows how to make smart people acting completely ridiculous feel relatable, and “The Four Seasons” gives her a perfect group to work with. Co-created by Fey, Lang Fisher, and Tracey Wigfield, the Netflix comedy-drama stars Fey, Steve Carell, Colman Domingo, Will Forte, Kerri Kenney-Silver, and Marco Calvani as three longtime couples who take vacations together throughout the year. The tradition gets blown apart when one marriage suddenly ends, forcing everyone to pick sides while pretending the trips can somehow keep going like normal.
That warm, slightly chaotic group chemistry makes this the closest match to “The Five Star Weekend.” Both shows put longtime friends around dinner tables, pour the wine, and wait for old resentments and uncomfortable truths to come out. “The Four Seasons” is funnier and spends more time on marriage, divorce, and midlife panic, but it has the same belief that old friends can drive you insane and still be exactly who you need when everything falls apart.
The Four Seasons
The decades-long friendship between three married couples is tested when one divorces, complicating their tradition of quarterly weekend getaways.
If you loved the secrets behind perfect lives, watch: ‘Big Little Lies’
Reese Witherspoon, Nicole Kidman, Laura Dern, Shailene Woodley, and Zoë Kravitz spend “Big Little Lies” living in gorgeous Monterey homes while quietly dealing with absolute chaos. Created by David E. Kelley from Liane Moriarty’s novel, the HBO Max drama opens with a death at a school fundraiser, then jumps backward to show how these five mothers became wrapped up in the same mess. Underneath the ocean views and perfect family photos are abusive marriages, affairs, custody fights, and people working very hard to convince everyone they’re fine.
“Big Little Lies” plays with the gap between the person everyone sees and what’s really happening behind closed doors. It’s much darker than “The Five Star Weekend,” and the murder mystery gives it a completely different engine, but the real power comes from watching these women stop judging each other and start showing up when it matters. If the female friendships and slowly exposed secrets pulled you into Hollis’ weekend, Monterey should be your next stop.
Big Little Lies
The tale of three mothers of first graders whose apparently perfect lives unravel to the point of murder.
If you loved the vacation drama, watch: ‘The White Lotus’
Mike White has built an entire show around one very reliable idea: a luxury vacation won’t fix anyone. It’ll just give them better scenery while they fall apart. Each season of “The White Lotus” drops a new cast of wealthy guests and exhausted employees into another incredible resort for one increasingly disastrous week. Jennifer Coolidge became the show’s breakout star, but the cast changes with each location as jealousy, money, sex, marriage, and power turn paradise into a complete mess.
Nantucket and the White Lotus resorts serve a similar purpose. They remove everyone from normal life, put them somewhere beautiful, and give their problems nowhere to hide. “The Five Star Weekend” treats that setup with warmth and genuinely wants Hollis and her friends to heal. “The White Lotus” is far more cynical and would usually prefer to watch its guests make everything worse. Still, both shows get a lot of mileage out of expensive vacations, complicated relationships, and people finally saying what they’ve been thinking all along.
The White Lotus
Follow the exploits of various guests and employees at an exclusive tropical resort over the span of a week as with each passing day, a darker complexity emerges in these picture-perfect travelers, the hotel’s cheerful employees and the idyllic locale itself.
If you loved watching people try to heal, watch: ‘Nine Perfect Strangers’
Nicole Kidman welcomes Melissa McCarthy, Michael Shannon, Regina Hall, Bobby Cannavale, and five other stressed-out guests to Tranquillum House in “Nine Perfect Strangers.” Based on another novel by “Big Little Lies” author Liane Moriarty, the Hulu drama follows nine strangers through a 10-day wellness retreat led by Kidman’s mysterious guru, Masha. Everyone arrives hoping to fix something, but Masha’s increasingly questionable methods make this much stranger than massages, meditation, and cucumber water.
Where Hollis trusts friendship to pull her out of grief, Masha turns healing into a full-on experiment. Both shows gather emotionally bruised people in a beautiful place and force them to deal with the things they’ve been avoiding, but “Nine Perfect Strangers” adds psychological suspense, unconventional treatments, and the constant suspicion that nobody should’ve trusted this woman. It’s a twistier, weirder version of the same basic promise: leave normal life for a while and maybe come back as someone new.
Nine Perfect Strangers
At a boutique health-and-wellness resort that promises healing and transformation, nine stressed city dwellers try to get on a path to a better way of living. Watching over them during this 10-day retreat is the resort’s director, Masha, a woman on a mission to reinvigorate their tired minds and bodies. However, these nine “perfect” strangers have no idea what is about to hit them.
More to watch after finishing ‘The Five Star Weekend’:
‘Firefly Lane’ | Netflix
Firefly Lane
For decades, childhood best friends Kate and Tully have weathered life’s storms together — until a betrayal threatens to break them apart for good.
‘Dead to Me’ | Netflix
Dead to Me
A hotheaded widow searching for the hit-and-run driver who mowed down her husband befriends an eccentric optimist who isn’t quite what she seems.
‘Little Fires Everywhere’ | Hulu
Little Fires Everywhere
The intertwined fates of the picture-perfect Richardson family and an enigmatic mother and daughter who upend their lives. Explore the weight of secrets, the nature of art and identity, the ferocious pull of motherhood – and the danger in believing that following the rules can avert disaster.
‘The Perfect Couple’ | Netflix
The Perfect Couple
Amelia is about to marry into one of the wealthiest families on Nantucket, until a shocking death derails the wedding — and turns everyone into a suspect.