Lord knows there are plenty of nominees to whom this award could go. If you thought the Screen Actors' Guild offered unreliable results, imagine what can happen when you let every idiot who enjoys pretending they know anything in the country have a say in the vote.
Lord knows there are plenty of People's Choice Awards that have been given out over the years that could be used to illustrate just how little they are actually worth.
But if there was ever a shark at all for the Peoples' Choice Awards to jump over, they jumped it in 2005.
It wasn't so much that the two-season spinoff of Friends was undeserving of the award. What really killed things for the Peoples' Choice Awards was the way in which it was awarded to them.
In 2005, the People's Choice Awards switched over from Gallup polls to online voting, and for whatever reason, decided to keep some of the categories open for voting all the way up until (and later, during), the actual awards show. One of those categories was "Favorite New TV Comedy," for which Joey was nominated.
The first presumption was that this was done as a very shallow publicity stunt. Later, the assumption became that they were deliberately stalling in those categories because the results of the vote when they should have closed were not to their liking.
This assumption came out of the fact that, after hyping the open voting several times during the show, they never explicitly stated when the voting would close. Then the categories would be announced out of the blue, seemingly at a completely random interval, with that being the only warning ever given that voting was over.
Complicating matters, there actually had been a last-minute rally online to get out the vote for this category, albeit for another show altogether.
Joey competed for the award against Father of the Pride, which had great writing and voice acting, but was facing cancellation anyway because of high production costs. Comedy and animation enthusiasts alike hoped that a PCA win would save the series, or at least inspire the networks to consider similar programs in the future, and rallied to support it.
And instead, the People's Choice Awards dragged their feet, kept the voting open until well into the awards show itself, then closed the voting without warning and rushed the award out to the Friends spinoff instead.
Did anyone really think the response to this would be positive?
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