Finally, an awards organization has broken the old protocol of having only five nominees per category. The Emmys just announced that they're expanding the number of nominees in some categories to six, sometimes even seven: comedy and drama series plus the races for series actors in lead and supporting roles. Hurrah!

By the way, this is curious news in light of a voting change that recently occurred at the Golden Globes where categories frequently overflowed in the past with six, even seven nominees when the vote was extremely close between the bottom-rung choices. Now a new accounting measure has been implemented that restricts each category to five nominees in the future.

But let's get back to the Emmys. Other changes were announced too and one of them was terrible. The TV academy is scrapping the blue-ribbon panels that once decided nominees after watching sample episodes submitted by the 10 shows and stars that received the most popular votes in each category. Now those nominees will be determined by outright popular vote of the TV academy and receive no close scrutiny.

The blue-ribbon panel process was instituted several years ago to give low-rated cable shows and stars a fair shot at a nomination over the biggies. However, when obscure contenders ended up bumping out popular series like "Lost," TV academy chiefs couldn't take the heat from the TV masses upset that their fave shows weren't nommed. In other words, Emmy chiefs didn't have the guts to stand by the result of their noble effort.

What a shame. Thereafter, the academy wimped out and came up with a "compromise" voting process two years ago that made no sense. It kept the blue-ribbon panels, but only let judges' scores count by half. Those scores were mixed on a 50/50 basis with the results of the original popular vote and that combo decided the five nominees per category.

Isn't that ridiculous? Of course, all that change did was skew the result toward the most popular shows, defeating the whole reason that the blue-ribbon panels were introduced in the first place. Still, a few underdogs still managed to creep in and even won! But now there's no hope for that in the future.

"The change going back to popular vote determining nominees (no first panel for top 10) means only the most popular shows/performers will get nominated," says our forums moderator Chris "Boomer" Beachum, one of our shrewdest Emmy experts. "People like Bryan Cranston and Zjelko Ivanek wouldn't have even been nominated in a popular-only system."

Upset victories by those underdog stars of basic-cable series "Breaking Bad" and "Damages" were widely cheered by TV critics and Emmy fans last September, but, as Boomer notes, there's little or no chance that such stars can prevail again in the future. Frankly, it was a miracle they even got nominated under the "compromise" voting system in place last year.

"It is a tragedy that less-known contenders are going to lose out to bigger names and perennial nominees in this new voting system," says The Envelope's Robert "Rob L" Licuria. "Could it be that ATAS is reacting to the now infamous top 10 leaks of years past?"

Aha! Interesting point! That wag is referring, of course, to The Envelope's notorious leaks of info about the blue-ribbon panels that we provided over the last few years. Yes, the TV academy made it clear that it was extremely unhappy about that.

But I think the real reason for this is money. It's a cost-saving matter. Setting up blue-ribbon panels is expensive and, frankly, pointless, if you're going to skew the result anyway by diluting the decision of those panels by 50%. Why bother?

The basic question is this: Did those panels play a valuable role in determining nominees? Answer: Absolutely yes — in their original form. The academy never should've wimped out and added the popular vote back in after it had already decided a top 10 runoff in each category. Once it did that, it might as well have scrapped the whole thing. Which ATAS just did.