Five Star Weekend trailer

I enjoy Jen Garner as a celebrity, I think she’s figured out her public persona and her niche—dorky mom who happens to be famous—and I find her genuinely wholesome and fun, and I am always thinking less of Ben Affleck for fumbling her. Oh, Ben Affleck made a bunch of AI money? Well, he fumbled Jennifer Garner, a total down-home babe, so is he REALLY winning? Or is everything now a kind of second place? Basically, Jennifer Garner is who Reese Witherspoon thinks she is. (Reese Witherspoon is too “president of the Ole Miss chapter of Pi Beta Phi” to be the girl next door and I wish she would just f-cking embrace her inner sorority bitch already.)

This is to say that while I like Jen Garner and root for her, I don’t actually like most of her output as an actress. I like HER, the celebrity, but her projects don’t interest me much. She has a new project coming out, though, which I will definitely tune into…because it co-stars Timothy Olyphant. It’s called The Five-Star Weekend, it’s adapted from an Elin Hilderbrand novel, and it’s about Hollis, a recent widow reconnecting with girlfriends from various stages of her life.

First, the Olyphant of it all. If you don’t know, Garner and Olyphant previously co-starred in Catch and Release, a thoroughly mediocre romantic dramedy that nevertheless features a super hot kissing scene. Timothy Olyphant knows How To Kiss On Screen. Behold.

So, a Garner-Olyphant reunion is most welcome. But the rest of the cast is stacked, too, with Chloe Sevigny, Gemma Chan, Regina Hall, and D’Arcy Carden starring as Hollis’s various life-stage friends. (I fundamentally reject a 50-something woman named Hollis; this is the Colleen Hoover Naming Problem in action.) And the trailer has some good moments, teasing a bit of life drama for the women, a mystery between Hollis and Gigi, Gemma Chan’s character, as well as some good jokes. The Golden Girls bit at the end is solid.

The Five-Star Weekend will stream on Peacock on July 16, which is another chance for Peacock to win over more viewers with original programming, and not just catering to cord cutters with Bravo and linear TV fare. It’s also a welcome return of the Garner-Olyphant on screen dynamic, which will hopefully be better than Catch and Release. Hard to be much worse, frankly.