Peacock began streaming The Five Star Weekend on Thursday, giving Jennifer Garner the lead in Elin Hilderbrand’s latest move from page to screen. It is the second Hilderbrand book to make that jump, and it arrives with the kind of timing that turns a release into a test of her staying power on television.
Viewers searching for Peacock TV news will find a new series tied to a writer whose novels have long been set on Nantucket and whose books have already sold more than 20 million copies worldwide. The Five Star Weekend was shot in Nantucket and Los Angeles, and Hilderbrand executive produced it without writing the screenplay, leaving the adaptation work to others while her name remains the draw.
That division matters because Hilderbrand has been plain about where she wants to spend her time. She said she has no interest in writing television, even as several of her books are being developed for the screen. Instead, she said, the book has to exist first, and the writer’s job is to turn it into compelling television. That line fits the way she has worked for years: she has said she never wrote in an office, and she has described writing longhand on a legal notepad while lying on a chaise longue in her living room facing the pool.
The new series also extends a screen track record that began with The Perfect Couple, which Netflix released as a mini-series in 2024. Hilderbrand has said seven or eight other books of hers are in development, but there is no public map yet for when any of them will land. For now, Peacock has the newest adaptation, Garner has the lead, and Hilderbrand’s books continue to move through Hollywood on a schedule that is still more promise than finish line.
That gap is the real story behind the premiere. Hilderbrand has built a career around Nantucket, published her first book, The Beach Club, in 2000, and said she has generated at least one escapist novel every year for 24 years. But the screen version of that empire is still in its early stretch, and the question now is not whether her work can travel. It is how many of those seven or eight projects actually make it to the screen.
