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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Carrie Fairchild" data-source="post: 365791" data-attributes="member: 673">Headland - 2005 to 2006 <img src="https://m.media-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BNDZkMjU5MDQtYmQyOC00MzUzLTg1MGYtZjM0NTQwNjQzNzkyXkEyXkFqcGdeQXVyODUyMTE2MTU@._V1_.jpg" alt="" class="fr-fic fr-dii fr-draggable " style="" /> Despite their popularity, Australian soaps never really exploited their spin-off potential in the same way that their American counterparts did. There’s been one off films (Bellbird’s Country Town), DVD specials (Home & Away: Secrets and the City) and miniseries (Erinsborough High) but an ongoing spin-off or same universe offshoot never came to pass. In 2002, Seven started discussing plans for a spin-off of its flagship soap H&A, in the hope that it’s new UK broadcast partner Channel 5 would come onboard as a co-producer. Soap maestro Bevan Lee was tasked with coming up with the goods and pitched Away from Home, which was to follow various Summer Bay residents (Dani Sutherland was rumoured to be one of them) as they attended Yabbie Creek University. Channel 5 opted out and reportedly asked Seven to rework the idea, as they didn’t want a H&A spin-off being scheduled opposite them on a rival station. Seven obliged and the great retooling began. The connection to Summer Bay was dropped and the show underwent several name changes including Ten Degrees South (nixed for fear of it being confused with BBC cop show 55 Degrees North) and Campus, before settling on Headland (stylised as headLand).Set in the fictional coastal university town of South Heads, the show opened with Craig (Sam Atwell, former H&A bad boy Kane Phillips) crashing his car into a tree, as him and a group of friends sped away from a party as one of them was overdosing in the backseat. With Craig the only survivor and now comatose, mystery surrounded the circumstances that led to the crash. Newly returned Adam Wilde (Conrad Coleby) found himself involved in his own mystery as he tried to work out if his estranged father Ben (John Brumpton) - who’d recently been released from prison after serving 15 years for murdering Adam’s mother - was actually his father or if local barman Mick (Steve Rodgers) was his real daddy. Future H&A star Josh Quong Tart (a lot of the cast would eventually migrate to Summer Bay in different roles) played Adam’s best mate Will while Sasha (Rachael Taylor) was the show’s blonde bombshell. The show also marked the first regular TV role for Yvonne Strahovski, who is now best known for US shows Chuck and The Handmaid’s Tale. Aussie soap veteran Libby Tanner played a main role as Grace while familiar soap faces Anne Tenney and Vanessa Downing popped up in guest spots.Seven clearly had high hopes for the show, as a second series had been greenlit and was already in production before the first season even made it to the air. However, the show’s July 2005 premiere was pushed back to the end of that year’s ratings period, after lukewarm test screenings resulted in the pilot being reworked. Eventually premiering November 15th, it was slated to air hourlong episodes every Tuesday and Thursday at 7.30pm for its first four weeks, before expanding to three episodes over the summer months to allow the show to “bed down an audience”. It opened to promising ratings of 1.3 million, with a Seven spokesperson saying "We are very happy with the opening nights audience figures for Headland. This is a program that builds and settles into a very strong storyline and character development. The opening episode is always the hardest." Rachael Taylor’s portrayal of Sasha won praise and comparisons to Melrose legend Amanda Woodward but there was criticism that some of the rest of the oversized cast of characters appeared interchangeable. Within a fortnight of the first episode, it became a case of “burn off episodes” rather than “bed down an audience” as ratings collapsed and the show was shifted to 7pm Monday to Thursday in a bid to capture the H&A audience while that show was on summer hiatus. By January 2006, after only two months on air, it had been removed from the weeknight schedule altogether, to make way for the return of H&A and the start of the Australian Open. It aired on Saturdays for a few weeks before production was officially halted on January 24th 2006, with no further episodes airing on Seven after that date. There was talk of the show being revisited later in the year with Seven stating "We still believe in the show, and we think it deserves a chance,". That chance never came to pass and Headland’s failure to maintain an audience above 800k and a perception that audiences preferred US drama over homegrown shows were cited as reasons for its demise. The remaining episodes of season one and the six episodes that had been produced for season two, eventually saw the light of day in 2009 when the show was repeated weekday mornings on newly launched digital channel 7two. It’s full run has also since been added to Seven’s streaming service 7plus. Viewers in Ireland and the UK got to see the show in September 2006, when it was re-formatted into half hour episodes and aired Monday to Friday at 7.30pm on E4. It failed to draw viewers there too and it was eventually moved to a daytime slot on Channel 4, where the remainder of the episodes were shown in their original hourlong format.</blockquote>

Verification: What month follows July?