regularly attracting just under a million viewers per episode – considered at that time a low figure for Australian prime time television. By March 2007, the Australian audience for Neighbours had fallen to fewer than 700,000 a night. This prompted a revamp of the show's cast, its visual presentation, and a move away from the recently added action-oriented emphasis to refocus the show on the domestic storylines it is traditionally known for. During this period Neighbours and Home and Away continued to achieve significant ratings in the UK. This and other lucrative overseas markets, along with Australian broadcasting laws that enforce a minimum amount of domestic drama production on commercial television networks, help ensure that both programs remain in production. Both shows get higher total ratings in the UK than in Australia (the UK has three times the total population of Australia) and the UK channels make a major contribution to the production costs. It has been suggested that with their emphasis on the younger, attractive and charismatic characters, Neighbours and Home and Away have found success in the middle ground between glamorous, fantastic U.S. soaps with their wealthy but tragic heroes and the more grim, naturalistic UK soap operas populated by older, unglamorous characters. The casts of Neighbours and Home and Away are predominantly younger and more attractive than the casts of UK soaps, and without excessive wealth and glamour of the U.S. daytime serial, a middle-ground in which they have found their lucrative niche. Neighbours was carried in the United States on the Oxygen cable channel in March 2004; however it attracted few viewers, perhaps in part due to its scheduling opposite well-established and highly popular U.S. soap operas such as All My Children and The Young and the Restless, and was dropped by the network shortly afterwards due to low ratings. headLand made its debut on Channel Seven in November 2005, the series arose out of a proposed spinoff of Home and Away that was to have been produced in conjunction with Home and Away UK broadcaster, Channel 5. The idea for the spin-off was scuttled after Five pulled out of the deal, which meant that the show could potentially air on a rival channel in the UK; as such, Five requested that the new show be developed as a standalone series and not be spun off from a series that it owned a stake in. The