By Scott Collins
LOS ANGELES TIMES

In one clip, viewed 14 million times on YouTube, family members stage a ‘puke-a-thon' contest to see who can hold off vomiting after guzzling ipecac. In another, the same brood performs a spirited song-and-dance routine about the joys of smoking marijuana.

Welcome to the world of Stewie, the diabolical toddler at the centre of Family Guy, who has supplanted Bart Simpson as TV's enfant terrible and who has just pushed the often-staid Emmys into new territory.

With its first major nomination on Thursday, Fox's cartoon series pulled off something even the longer-running The Simpsons couldn't, becoming the first animated show in the comedy category since The Flintstones back in 1961.

The raunchy Family Guy, a rare case of a onetime underground show rising to claim its first major nod a full decade after its network premiere, is about as far away from Fred's and Barney's traditional homes in Bedrock as the Emmys have ever ventured in such a prominent category. Set among the Griffin clan in Quahog, R.I., along with the family's talking, martini-sipping dog, Brian, the show swims in a sea of jokes about celebrity, politics, religion and bodily functions.

The triumph of quirky shows such as Family Guy as well as Showtime's Weeds and HBO's musical whimsy Flight of the Conchords - two other first-time comedy nominees - offers as compelling a sign as any of the near-total retreat of the more conventional sitcoms like Seinfeld and Friends that not so long ago dominated network lineups. Family Guy - which has inspired a spinoff, The Cleveland Show, which will premiere this fall - averaged 7.6 million viewers for the past season, according to Nielsen Media Research. That is a moderately sized audience by today's network standards, but it's far larger than the approximately 1 million viewers HBO nets for Conchords.

"The playing field is different now," said Family Guy creator Seth MacFarlane, the former Hanna-Barbera animator whose recent 100-million-dollar deal with Fox reportedly made him the highest-paid writer working in television.

But the larger meaning of Family Guy's breakthrough can't be summed up with a few stats in the record books. It was twice cancelled by Fox, only to return after strong DVD sales and high ratings for cable reruns persuaded network executives to take another chance five years ago. Family Guy thus furnishes a viable model for other niche series chasing critical and commercial success in a highly fragmented media market.

"It was a show ahead of its time, and its audience caught up with it," said John Rash, an analyst for ad firm Campbell Mithun, who notes that DVDs and the Internet have helped once-taboo forms of comedy thrive, in stark contrast to past decades when networks programmed family comedies that tried to please everyone. "The expanded media landscape allows for more focused, if not more individualized, expressions of humour."

Indeed, tastes are changing across the board. This year, for the first time, none of the seven nominees in the newly expanded comedy category is in the conventional sitcom style pioneered more than 50 years ago by I Love Lucy, shot with multiple cameras on a soundstage, often with a laugh track to underscore what the creators hoped were the funny parts.

Through the 1990s, such shows had a virtual lock on the Emmys. Frasier, the Cheers spinoff that starred Kelsey Grammer as a neurotic radio call-in host, scored five consecutive wins in the comedy category through 1998 and was the most honoured show in Emmy history. Filmed in front of a live audience with elegant sets and highly polished scripts, Frasier represented perhaps the creative apex of the traditional sitcom format, which is much like a live stage performance captured on film.

But over the past decade, so-called single-camera comedies, which feel more like movies than typical sitcoms, have won over many TV viewers. And Emmy voters have slowly come around. NBC's The Office and 30 Rock, workplace shows that conspicuously avoid laugh tracks and other theatrical touches common to conventional TV comedies, have taken top honours the past several years. Both are being recognized again this year, with Tina Fey's 30 Rock landing 22 nominations, a record for a comedy.

The nod for Family Guy broadens horizons further. While animated series have long been a prime-time programming staple - Fox has more or less devoted its entire Sunday-night lineup to them - Emmy voters have proved skittish about considering cartoons outside the separate category for animated productions. Both The Simpsons and King of the Hill campaigned in the past for consideration in the comedy category, to no avail. "It's been somewhat frustrating seeing how prominent a force animated series have become and (that) there's been unwillingness to accept that" among voters, said MacFarlane, who also garnered an Emmy nomination for his voice-over work as the show's patriarch.

Yet creators felt Family Guy had become accepted enough to merit Emmy consideration.