“California Avenue” is the new show from Hugo Blick, the brains behind some of modern TV’s most impressive dramas, including Emily Blunt starrer “The English,” “The Honourable Woman” with Maggie Gyllenhaal and Michaela Coel-fronted “Black Earth Rising.”
Unsurprisingly, “California Avenue” features an equally star-studded cast in the form of Bill Nighy (“Love Actually), Helena Bonham Carter (“Fight Club”), Erin Doherty (“Adolescence”) and Tom Burke (who’s currently shooting Alex Garland’s “Elden Ring.”)
Produced by Blick’s production company Eight Rooks and Drama Republic for the BBC, the series is set at an English mobile home park in the summer of 1975, when Doherty’s character Lela returns home after a long absence with her 11-year-old daughter in tow. It was in part inspired by Blick’s own experiences of staying with his beloved grandparents in a mobile home community.
“Set in the bucolic British summer of 1975, with a fabulous period soundtrack, this is a warm and witty story about a family on the run from the past and themselves who end up in a community of outsiders,” Blick tells Variety. “Whether these people live in trailers, caravans or RVs, their (non)status as outcasts and misfits is universal. But like ‘The Darling Buds of May,’ or ‘Schitt’s Creek,’ sometimes it’s the folk with nothing who have the most to give.”
