The Five Star Weekend began streaming on Peacock TV on Thursday, giving Elin Hilderbrand’s Nantucket-set catalog another screen entry with Jennifer Garner in the lead. It is the second time one of her books has reached television, and it arrives while she says seven or eight more are already in development.
Jennifer Garner on Peacock
The Five Star Weekend is the second Elin Hilderbrand novel to become a screen project after The Perfect Couple, which Netflix released as a mini-series in 2024. Hilderbrand executive produced the new adaptation but did not write the screenplay, leaving the television work to the writer while she kept the book’s structure intact.
She has said the book comes first. “I think seven or eight other books of mine are in development, and my approach, which I would never change, is the book exists,” she said. “I will talk to the writer before they get started. It’s their job to turn it into compelling television. I have no interest in writing television.”
Nantucket as a pipeline
Hilderbrand has lived on Nantucket for over three decades and has used the island as the setting for nearly all of her 31 novels, so each adaptation extends a very specific on-screen brand rather than a generic beach-drama template. The Five Star Weekend was shot in Nantucket and Los Angeles, which keeps the production tied to the place that made the book part of her larger commercial identity.
That identity is already large: she has sold more than 20 million books worldwide, and she has generated at least one escapist novel every year for 24 years. The result is a steady feed of properties that can be adapted without waiting for a new literary breakout.
Shelby Cunningham in 2025
She also has another book pipeline of her own. In 2025, Hilderbrand and her 20-year-old youngest child, Shelby Cunningham, published The Academy, and she said their conversations helped inspire a two-book series; “There was no chance I could have written these two books by myself,” she said. “I didn’t go to boarding school. I’m not a teenager, and Gen Z has such a different way of communicating.”
For viewers, the practical takeaway is simple: Peacock TV now has a fresh Hilderbrand title to sell, and the adaptation lane is not slowing down. Which other books are in the seven or eight projects she mentioned has not been identified, but the next phase of this franchise is already moving beyond one title at a time.
