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There's just one problem. Lonesome Dove didn't win.

We count on the Emmys to get at least one category horribly, inexplicably wrong each year — and the voters never fail us.

Why are these the most strangely unpredictable of all the major awards? The television academy changes the rules and the playing field every year, adding, dropping, combining and dividing categories. And the two-part voting process lets all academy members vote for the nominees, but only members who promise to watch submitted tapes can vote for the awards. Of course, we'll never know if they watch those tapes. All we can know for certain from the awards and the nominations is that the voters don't watch TV, which must be the other reason they come up with peculiar decisions.

How peculiar? Here, for your pre-Emmy entertainment, is a list of the 10 Top Howler Awards in Academy History (listed by the years of the Emmy ceremonies):

1955: 'Men' overboard

Today, it's generally accepted that the claustrophobic courtroom drama Twelve Angry Men was one of thegreatest, if not the greatest, achievement of the Golden Age of live, original TV. Apparently, though, the appeal of Men wasn't as clear to Emmy voters in 1955. They gave the Emmy for "Program of the Year" not to Men, butto a Disneyland documentary about the making of the movie 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea called Operation Undersea — humorously known in the industry, says a Disney Web site, as "The Long, Long Trailer." In this case, history says the joke was on the academy.

1958: Lucy plays herself — and not well enough

To be fair, it isn't always easy to categorize TV shows or performances, or even to know whether categorization is the right approach. Should all actors be judged together, or should they be split by sex and genre into smaller groups? And how do you deal with people who are performing but not acting, like talk-show hosts and the stars of variety shows?

Emmy's first answer was to separate "personalities" from "actors" and "comedians." In 1958, however, the academy came up with an award for "The Best Continuing Performance in a Series by a Woman Who Essentially Plays Herself" — along with its equally clumsily titled male counterpart. Though that may be a little hard to inscribe on an award nameplate, you get what Emmy was aiming at.

The problem was, the academy placed Lucille Ball's performance in I Love Lucy in this category. Sorry, but no matter how much one may have loved Lucy, she wasn't Lucy — something you'd think her peers would have noticed.

To add insult to injury, she didn't win. The award went to Dinah Shore, who was at least playing something closer to a version of herself than Ball was.

1965: Leonard Bernstein tops Illya Kuryakin

Your first question, no doubt, is what was Leonard Bernstein doing in the same Emmy boat as David McCallum, the exotically hot agentIllya from The Man From U.N.C.L.E.? The answer lies in one of those periodic academy attempts to cut back on the otherwise ever-increasing number of categories.

Unfortunately, in its zeal to make the awards less cumbersome and less competitive, the academy went a shade overboard. It replaced the specific individual categories with four general ones: one for entertainment programs, one for news and sports programs, and two for individual achievements in those two areas. It then made the number of nominations and winners in each category open-ended.

As everyone but Emmy voters foresaw, confusion reigned. Thanks to his Young People's Concerts, Bernstein was one of five actors or performers who won for "entertainment achievement," with McCallum one of the 11 who didn't. Pretty much everyone went home unhappy, and the academy went back to the old multiple categories/one winner format the next year.

Oh, by the way, Tonight Show king Johnny Carson lost to Broadway legends Lunt & Fontanne. Let's just say it was an unusual year.

Robert Bianco, USA TODAY