Two years ago when she ended an 11-year stretch on the soap "The Bold and the Beautiful," Maeve Quinlan had every reason to expect that her days of hyperexaggerated reality were behind her.

Then she grappled with infidelity and a crumbling marriage, while her birth son became addicted to pain killers, her adopted son impregnated his girlfriend, and her daughter found herself attracted to other girls.

It's all in a day's work for the Winnetka-born actress, who plays often-unyielding, ultra-conservative matriarch Paula Carlin on "South of Nowhere." The edgy drama, which begins its third season at 7 p.m. Friday on Nickelodeon's teen network The N, chronicles a family's tumultuous transition from Midwestern complacence to frenetic Los Angeles living. Since debuting last winter, the series has earned raves from its adolescent following, and ire from some religious groups, which have balked at its depiction of budding homosexuality.

Like her "Nowhere" character, the 42-year-old Quinlan's a staunch Irish Catholic, but of a more liberal bent. She's aware of the protests lodged against her show but insists no one's complained to her personally.

"Guess what? This is life," she says.

"Personally, I feel this show sends a really great message, because to love someone is to accept someone.

"What's interesting now (is the Carlin family was) very strong at the end of the second season, and I think it says a lot about this show. Here's a family that has all this going on -- race issues, pregnancy, drugs, sex, infidelity -- and yet we stick together."

That familial unity in the face of adversity may be why the series has at least one fan who's well outside its core demographic. "My mom, a convent-educated woman who goes to church every Sunday and says the rosary, loves the show," says Quinlan.

"She really feels that people need to watch it because this is what's going on out there. This is kids' lives, and it's a lot different than when you and I went to high school."

When this child of Irish immigrants walked the halls of Winnetka's New Trier High School, she scarcely expected she'd one day be in the thick of such drama. A tennis prodigy, Quinlan enjoyed a standout junior and collegiate career, attending Northwestern University on an athletic scholarship and playing Wimbledon and the U.S. Open.

Transferring to the University of Southern California in Los Angeles after her sophomore year, she revisited her high school love of theater by taking elective drama courses.

"A professor there told me, 'If you do not become an actress, then you have taken this 'A' I'm going to give you and not done anything with it,'" she recalls.

"I said, 'I have to play the (tennis) circuit now; that's what my life was mapped out to be.' She said, 'What does that have to do with anything? You can start acting when you're 85 if you do it for the right reasons.'"

Those words lingered with Quinlan, who quit professional tennis after a year and a half on tour. A two-day stint on daytime's "General Hospital" prepped her for her "Beautiful" years. Moonlighting in films, she demonstrated a knack for envelope-pushing provocation, most infamously as a housewife who romances a teenage boy in the explicit 2002 drama "Ken Park." More recently, she played an adult film star, albeit one who finds religion, on Courteney Cox's FX series, "Dirt."

Needless to say, Paula Carlin would not approve. And Quinlan couldn't care less.

"It's pretty funny, because I think initially, people assume that you're like your character," she says.

"I could not be more different."