“California Avenue” is Hugo Blick’s new BBC drama, set in a mobile home park in rural England during the summer of 1975. The six-episode series follows Lela, played by Erin Doherty, who flees an abusive marriage and arrives with her 11-year-old daughter at the community where she grew up. There, she reconnects with her parents, played by Bill Nighy and Helena Bonham Carter, and begins to rebuild the fractured relationships she left behind. Tom Burke also stars as a man with his own reasons for retreating to the community, and his character becomes part of the story’s emotional center.
The series is produced by Blick’s company Eight Rooks alongside Drama Republic for the BBC. It is inspired in part by Blick’s own childhood memories of spending time with his grandparents in a mobile home community and watching 1970s television. Blick has described the show as a warm, witty story about outsiders and misfits, set against a bucolic British summer and driven by themes of family, belonging and emotional repair. He has said the story reflects how people who live on the margins can still have the most to give.
According to producer Greg Brenman, the project began in development with the BBC several years ago and was initially pitched as a story about people escaping the world in different ways. He said the series is also a kind of love letter to 1970s television, which shaped Blick’s imagination as a child. Brenman explained that the show begins with Lela running away from the mansion where she lives with an abusive husband. She travels overnight with her daughter to the mobile home park, only to reveal that she is returning home to her parents and introducing her daughter to them for the first time.
The drama explores multiple relationships at once: a mother healing with her daughter, a daughter reconnecting with her parents, an enduring marriage between the characters played by Nighy and Bonham Carter, and a romance between Doherty and Burke’s characters. Brenman said the 11-year-old daughter acts as a witness to the warmth and complexity of the community, which is made up of people seen as off-grid or socially outside the mainstream.
Brenman also credited Blick’s writing for attracting major talent. He said the cast responded to the scripts’ emotional depth and unusual tone, noting that the series is not built around genre tropes such as crime or action, but around love, humor and character. He added that the appeal of working with Blick, along with the quality of the material, helped bring the cast together.
Although “California Avenue” was not created specifically as an ongoing series, Brenman said it could return in the future. For now, the story is designed as a self-contained six-part drama about people leaving the past behind and ending up in a better place than when they began.
