Family sitcoms have come a long way since Leave It To Beaver (thank god). Heck, in the past five years we’ve seen major shifts with shows like Modern Family and Californication. Tonight, CityTV will break down another barrier with the premiere of SEED, a show about artificial insemination. Although SEED is a comedy, the subject of the show is sure to raise more serious topics pertaining to fertility and the age-old debate of nature versus nurture.

Carrie-Lynn Neales is the actor who plays Rose, the 30-something professional who is single and desperate to conceive. (Sounds more heavy than funny, but think Baby Mama versus real world.) When I met up with her last week, we talked about adoption versus artificial insemination and the evolution of sitcom families since the days of Family Ties and Growing Pains; but what I found most interesting about Carrie-Lynn was her journey as an actor.

If you have friends who are actors, you know that finding steady work isn’t easy. Paying the bills usually comes from waiting tables, and making a buck often means taking on commercial work; very rarely does a script (with a promising future) come along that genuinely excites. Lucky for Carrie-Lynn, SEED was the lucky break she’d been waiting for. “I laughed out loud upon first reading and immediately related to Rose,” she said. “I just got it.” Eerily, the year to the day before Carrie-Lynn signed on to do the first season of SEED, she was very close to quitting the biz all together. “I woke up and said to my partner at the time, ‘I’m done. I’m going to get my transcripts, go back to school, and be a midwife,'” she said. He urged her to keep at it for a few more years, risk everything, and do whatever she could to make it work. Great advice! Not so easy to follow. But she did it.

“Up until a year ago, I was serving,” said Carrie-Lynn. “You do what you have to do to have the money and time to focus on your passion. I tried working at a temp agency and doing the nine to five thing, but it got in the way of auditions. I think it’s important for anyone starting out to keep his or her eye on the prize. Hard work pays off.” And although Carrie-Lynn is just shy of 30, she has some solid advice for young actors: “Keep taking classes! Auditioning is a skill you need to develop; find a teacher and work with him/her or get together with recent grads to read plays or write together.”

Along with acting, Carrie-Lynn hits the yoga studio five times a week. “We are actors by trade but we aren’t actors as people,” she said. “Find other interests you love and nurture them just as much.” Beyond being something she loves to do, she has found that the yoga helps with audition stress: “You gotta leave the audition in the room. I will often go to my mat after an audition and breathe it out.

If she’s not breathing deeply on a mat or working on set, then Carrie-Lynn enjoys meeting friends for sushi in the Annex or cycling around Toronto. Although it’s been a challenging few years, she’s delighted with landing the part of Rose on SEED. If she could whisper some advice to her 21-year-old self, she’d say, “Don’t worry so much about the small stuff. Be grateful for where you are! It’s easy to slip into that thinking that nothing is happening, but stuff is happening… all the time!”

Check out SEED Mondays on CityTV at 8:30pm EST. Laugh, debate, and support Canadian television!