Turns out NBCUniversal streaming service Peacock can do more than Love Island and sports. It’s ordered a second season of scripted show The Five-Star Weekend, weeks after the show became Peacock’s most-watched scripted original ever.
“It’s such a joy and privilege to create a world that people want to keep living in,” said creator and executive producer Bekah Brunstetter. “I’m so thrilled by the chance to give fans of the show more time with the stars, and dig even further into these incredible characters. Knowing how deeply committed they are to this trip, I can’t wait to take them on their next adventure.”
The show’s first season is Peacock’s most-watched original, with 1.8 billion minutes viewed. To some extent, that’s a modest achievement, given the lack of competition among Peacock originals. When Peacock launched in mid-pandemic, it featured few originals other than The Flight Attendant.
Shifting corporate strategies, the pandemic shutdown and later twin strikes by Hollywood unions only complicated efforts to create meaningful original titles in the years since.
The service does feature name-brand NBC programming such as Saturday Night Live and Law & Order, and one of the industry’s best portfolios of sports rights, including the NFL, NBA, English Premier League, Olympics and college sports.
It also popular unscripted shows from the so-called Bravo-verse of Bravo, the lone cable network that NBCUniversal kept when owner Comcast spun off most such assets to form Versant. Bravo, the company said then, was too important to Peacock to encourage return viewing and engagement.
That was proved again in recent weeks as reality competition Love Island achieved something like cultural omnipresence thanks to the horny antics of its under-dressed and overly attractive competitors.
Now Peacock has something else to preen about. Preliminary Nielsen data ranked the show in the top 5 streaming original series over the first two weeks after its July 9 premiere.
The eponymous book on which the show is based sits in the New York Times top 10 bestsellers list, the latest streaming conversion of a title by Nantucket-based novelist Elin Hilderbrand. Previously, Netflix adapted The Perfect Couple into a hit 2024 murder mystery featuring Nicole Kidman and Liev Schreiber.
Netflix is reportedly adapting Hilderbrand’s Swan Song as a sequel to The Perfect Couple, while the three books in the so-called Paradise Trilogy are also under development.
The Five-Star Weekend follows a food blogger played by Jennifer Garner (also an executive producer) as she tries to recover from the loss of her husband by inviting four friends from key moments in her life to join her for a weekend at her Nantucket house. The friends are played by Regina Hall, Chlöe Sevigny, Gemma Chan, and D’Arcy Carden.
“We’re so happy you love it as much as we loved making it for you,” Garner said in a release. “If you’re curious about what’s going to happen next, imagine how we feel!”
Peacock, which claims 48 million subscribers, has had challenges becoming profitable, taking 24 quarters, six full years, to get in the black. Most competitors took far less time to hit break even, though practically all of them spent billions of dollars on programming during the Streaming Wars, trying and failing to lock in customers.
Peacock’s profits may also be hard to sustain. Skeptics have noted profits came after a half year where Peacock featured Love Island’s must-watch antics, as well as the Winter Olympics, Super Bowl, NBA playoffs, and the World Cup (in Spanish through NBCU-owned Telemundo). The NFL and college football will buoy Q3, but it’s not obvious what else will drive viewership.
With more shows such as The Five-Star Weekend, though, Peacock might have a chance of keeping fans around after the big games are done.
To further drive viewership and revenue, Peacock also recently agreed to include its ad-free Premium version inside the Google-owned YouTube Premium subscription service. The approach should help both services.
The programming win with The Five-Star Weekend also comes weeks after Comcast announced that it plans to spin its NBCUniversal entertainment holdings, including Peacock, out of its main telecom-focused operation into a standalone company.