Like a modern-day Prospero, the author Elin Hilderbrand has spent many years on a little island casting spells—in book form. She’s churned out 30 novels in the last 25 years, almost all of them tales of love, loss, friendship, and other softer concerns set on Nantucket, the sea-surrounded paradise that Hilderbrand calls home. She has become the go-to author of distaff beach reads, a more contemporary, perhaps more sophisticated Nora Roberts. Her books are massively successful, and yet only two have been adapted for the screen thus far. 

First there was The Perfect Couple, an achingly dumb Netflix mystery series starring Nicole Kidman, who really needs to quit gambling or whatever bad habit she has that keeps her working so much. (Don’t break Nicole Kidman’s legs, mister!) But that story was Hilderbrand’s first attempt at a thriller, so despite its Nantucket setting and un-self-conscious veneration of wealth, it’s not exactly representative of Hilderbrand’s main output. 

Enter, then, The Five-Star Weekend, a glossy new Peacock series that maybe better encapsulates what Hilderbrand has been all about for a quarter century. The show stars Jennifer Garner as the stupidly named Hollis Shaw, a rich and recently widowed food influencer who lives in the monied Boston suburb of Wellesley, but also has a colossal shingle house out on Nantucket, where she grew up. Garner has become something of a food influencer herself, and is publicly obsessed with one Ina Garten (of East Hampton), so this role may be the culmination of a dream. 

Which is in keeping with the show, which aims to see a particular kind of fantasy realized. It is chock full of lush interiors—designed to hell, but homey—and sumptuous looking food. Money is spoken about, and economic disparities are addressed, but mostly we are meant to succumb to the easy, comfortable glamor of it all. Sure, the show is about a dead husband and a terrible secret and lots of other problems, but there is a lightness to The Five-Star Weekend that is necessary to its genre of beach read. And now, I suppose, of beach watch—for surely there will be some mom knee-deep in High Noons streaming this on her phone on Horseneck, turning to gaze out toward Buzzards Bay and its distant islands, sighing and imagining what if. 

I am a sucker for this kind of thing, having spent my own New England summers as a kid longing for the WASPy finery across the road. So I am more susceptible than your average viewer, maybe. There’s a good chance that many of you will watch some of The Five-Star Weekend (premiering July 9) and scoff at just about everything. After all, it is a look at a rarefied life that strikes a pose of earthiness and relatability while meanly undermining us in the process, making us feel like styleless paupers peering through the hedgerow for a glimpse at how things ought to be. It’s a show probably worthy of dismissal on, like, political grounds.