Nantucket on Screen: What The Five-Star Weekend and The Perfect Couple Get Right, and Leave Out

The Five-Star Weekend was filmed literally outside Bernadette's office door. The production spent three weeks on Main Street, at Bartlett's Farm, and at Cru, just steps from where Maury People Sotheby's International Realty has done business for years. It followed The Perfect Couple, which became Netflix's most-watched show in its opening week back in 2024. Two hit productions, one small island, and a question worth asking well after the credits roll: how much of what viewers saw was actually Nantucket, and how much was the version that plays well on screen?

The Short Version

• The Five-Star Weekend, based on Elin Hilderbrand's novel, premiered on Peacock on July 9, 2026, with all eight episodes released at once, following three weeks of filming on Nantucket in 2025.
• It followed The Perfect Couple, also based on a Hilderbrand novel, which became Netflix's #1 show in its first week in 2024.
• Both shows capture something real about Nantucket's look and feel, but television necessarily leaves out the practical realities of actually owning here.
• Nantucket's real estate market has its own, independently documented luxury-market distinction that has nothing to do with either show.

Nantucket has become a character in its own right

The Five-Star Weekend follows a food influencer, played by Jennifer Garner, who gathers friends from different chapters of her life for a weekend on the island after an unexpected loss. Chloë Sevigny, Regina Hall, Gemma Chan, and D'Arcy Carden round out the cast. The production spent roughly three weeks filming on Nantucket in the fall of 2025, using real locations: Main Street, Bartlett's Farm, Cru, Nantucket Looms, and a private home on Eel Point Road, among others. It was the first major Hollywood production to film primarily on the island.

It arrives two years after The Perfect Couple, also adapted from a Hilderbrand novel, which introduced a much wider audience to a highly stylized version of Nantucket and quickly became Netflix's most-watched show in its debut week. Between the two, Nantucket has gone from a backdrop many people knew by reputation to a place they have now watched, repeatedly, in close detail.

What the shows get right

Both productions capture something genuine about the island: the visual distinctiveness of weathered shingle homes against open water, the contrast between an easygoing surface and considerable underlying wealth, and the sense that a Nantucket property is often part of a family's long-running story rather than a single transaction. The emphasis on gathering, entertaining, and multigenerational tradition is not exaggerated for effect. That part of island life is real, and it's a large part of why people who visit start thinking seriously about staying

What television leaves out

What neither show can fully convey is how differently that same visual language plays out depending on where, specifically, a property sits. A harbor-front home, a quiet pond-front lot, and an oceanfront house on the 'Sconset bluff can each be described as classic Nantucket, and each comes with a genuinely different set of practical considerations, from flood exposure to construction rules to how the property actually gets used day to day. Historic-district review, conservation restrictions, and the seasonal reality of getting on and off an island are not dramatic enough for television, but they are exactly the things that determine whether a property works for the life someone is picturing.

There is also a year-round Nantucket that neither show has much reason to depict: a working community of roughly 14,750 people that television, understandably, has little use for once the cameras leave in the fall.

Does the screen attention actually change the island?

It's reasonable to ask whether this kind of exposure moves the real estate market. There isn't evidence that it does, and it would be overstating things to claim otherwise. What can be said with more confidence is that national television exposure expands awareness and gives people who may have only known Nantucket by reputation an actual visual reference point.

Elin Hilderbrand herself has spoken publicly about hoping the attention lands during the shoulder seasons, May and October, rather than adding to an already busy summer; she's been candid that the publicity is something of a double-edged sword for an island that's already at capacity in July and August. That's a locally-grounded, realistic hope, not a guarantee, and it's the more honest read on what screen exposure can actually do for a place like this. It's also a genuine window into island life that television, understandably, has little reason to show: Nantucket in May or October is a real, different place from the one either series depicts, quieter and less crowded, and one that full-time residents describe as the actual reason they live here.

Separately, and independent of either show, Nantucket has its own documented distinction in the current luxury housing market. Realtor.com's June 2026 Luxury Housing Report found Nantucket has the steepest entry point to the top 10% of listings among the luxury markets it analyzed, and that more than half of the island's housing stock is set aside for vacation or seasonal use, the highest concentration of any luxury market in the country. That scarcity, not a television series, is what actually shapes pricing here.

The difference between visiting and owning

This is where the distinction actually matters for someone newly curious about the island. A visit, or a season spent watching a show set here, tends to produce an emotional response to Nantucket as a whole. Owning here successfully depends on much narrower questions: which part of the island someone actually wants to spend time in, whether they're looking for proximity to town or real privacy, how often they'll realistically use the property, and whether they want something move-in ready or are prepared to take on a renovation. Someone drawn to the version of Nantucket they've just watched on screen is often better served starting with what a specific budget actually buys here than the version built for eight episodes of television. For anyone whose screen-inspired daydream runs toward a house on the water specifically, the practical realities of buying waterfront on Nantucket are a useful next stop.

The bottom line

Television can capture how beautiful Nantucket is. It can't explain why one part of the island feels exactly right to one buyer and completely wrong to another. That understanding comes from time on the ground and a clear sense of how someone actually intends to live here, not from eight episodes, however well filmed.