Warning: This post contains spoilers for the Season 1 finale of The Five Star Weekend
Can you keep a secret? Bekah Brunstetter crucially decided not to when she adapted Elin Hilderbrand‘s bestselling novel, The Five Star Weekend, into a Peacock streaming series. In the book, successful food blogger Hollis Shaw (Jennifer Garner) sees her life spiral following the death of her husband, Matthew (Josh Hamilton). As part of her grieving process, she invites four female friends from different stages of her life to her picturesque home on Natucket for two days of bonding, eating, and healing.
But one of those pals is hiding some key information. Hollis befriended Gigi (Gemma Chan) over Instagram, and asks the globetrotting pilot to be the designated internet friend in a vacation group that includes childhood friend, Tatum (Chloë Sevigny), college friend Dru-Ann (Regina Hall), mom group friend Brooke (D’Arcy Carden) — plus her grown daughter, Caroline (Harlow Jane). As we learn in the first episode, though, Gigi is also Matthew’s lover, who he was supposedly on his way to see before he got in the car accident that ended his life.
On the page, a frenemy of the quintet (played in the series by Judy Greer) drops that piece of intel in a public setting, leading Gigi to flee while Holly pursues her and gets the full story. But she crucially doesn’t confirm the affair with the rest of the friend group or with Caroline, allowing them to think that Gigi was the target of vicious gossip from a vicious person.
In bringing The Five Star Weekend to the small screen, though, Brunstetter decided not to keep Gigi’s history with Matthew on the down low, having Brooke initially discover Gigi’s relationship with Matthew and then clue the rest of the characters in as the series goes along. A version of the book scene does still play out onscreen; Episode 7 finds Greer’s character exposing Gigi’s secret in front of Caroline, who is the last to learn about her father’s indiscretion.
“I just felt if no one found out the whole weekend, people would just be throwing things at the TV,” the showrunner tells Gold Derby with a laugh. “How annoying would that be? It was a directive in the writers room to have the character find out sooner, and giving Brooke the initial burden of the secret was a delightful concept to me, because she wanted so badly to be liked.”
In a separate interview, both Carden and Chan made it clear they approved of how the writers flipped the script on the novel. “It was such a fun turn for Brooke because she never expected to discover that,” Carden notes. “She didn’t want to know about it, and it flips the weekend on its head for her. It was so much fun for me to play that switch in my relationship with Gemma.”
Chan, meanwhile, appreciated getting to confront the ramifications of Gigi’s affair instead of spending the entire series avoiding them. “She’s has to really deal with people’s reactions, and it’s a real reckoning for her,” the actress says. “What I find good about the story and the way Gigi has been written is that she’s not villainized. She’s very much a flawed human being who has made mistakes — and there are consequences — but she’s just doing her best. She’s not a two-dimensional “other woman” villain. You’re rooting for her; I know I was.”
The fallout from the revelation of the affair comes to a head in the Season 1 finale, where Hollis learns from Gigi that Matthew had decided to end the affair and was heading home to her when he died. After one final conversation, the two arrive at an understanding as well as a mutual agreement that their virtual and IRL friendship is over.
“It was lovely to meet you all,” Gigi tells the rest of the group as she exits the house — and the series — to parts unknown. While the rest of the characters receive mini-codas in the finale’s closing moments revealing their post-Five Star Weekend trajectories, we never see Chan’s alter ego again as the season wraps up.
Turns out that there’s a deleted scene that reveals exactly where Gigi went. Brunstetter and Chan revealsthat the finale originally featured an encounter between Gigi and Caroline at the Nantucket airport as they both prepared to leave the island that paves the way for the mother and daughter reunion — and Caroline’s acceptance of Hollis’s former and maybe future flame, Jack (Timothy Olyphant) — that serves as the finale’s emotional denouement.
“There were some parallels to what they both were going through in terms of their feelings of guilt and a little bit of self-loathing,” Chan says of the emotions that were running underneath that missing scene. “They’re both at a tricky, messy point in their lives and they really connect over that. And in that scene at the airport, Gigi is actually the reason why Caroline goes back to see her mom. I’m not sure why they cut it out; it was a really sweet scene.”
For her part, Brunstetter says the decision to drop that scene came out of a desire to tell “the simplest, most compelling version of the story,” in the finale. “We just didn’t feel like we needed it,” she remarks. “To me, Hollis telling Gigi, ‘I’m going to forgive you, but get out of my face,’ makes us feel like Hollis has experienced some growth, so we didn’t want this sense that they had forgiven each other and everything’s great. We didn’t want to end with that level of sweetness in our mouths.
“We wanted to make it clear that Holli is forgiving Gigi, but she also doesn’t want to see her ever again,” Brunstetter continues. “So we wanted to get Gigi out of the way, and then let Hollis stay with her remaining friends and find some healing with Caroline — and maybe a glimmer of a potential future with Jack.”
Speaking of potential futures, The Five Star Weekend finale ends with Hollis suggesting that these reunions become annual events, with Brooke pitching Greece as the next location. Brunstetter says that pitch is definitely directed at the Peacock executives as they weigh whether or not to order Season 2.
“The way we set up the show is that they could do a million girls’ trips,” she says with a grin. “That’s our dream. We have to see what the audience thinks and what Peacock things. But we’ve designed the show so that they could really go anywhere, and we’d be meeting up with them again each year. And Gigi’s not invited!”
Informed that her alter ego won’t be receiving an invite to Greece, Chan reacts in mock horror, leading Carden to insist that an exception be made. “Bekah may be the showrunner, but there are ways that Gigi could show up,” the actress argues. “She’s a pilot, so she could show up anywhere!”
For the record, the show’s source material backs up that claim. Hilderbrand’s novel ends with fantasy-laced epilogue where Hollis and her friends are flying back from an Italian vacation — and it turns out that Gigi is, of course, piloting the plane. That’s an easy set-up for a Season 2 that starts with Chan flying the jumbo jet that’s carrying the other women to Greece, and then a mechanical mishap forces her to crash their second Five Star Weekend.
“Perfect,” Carden says with a smile when we give her that pitch. “We’ve got the solution — we’ll tell Becca.” After all, there’s no need to keep that solution a secret from the show’s boss.
