Joey, which centered on Matt LeBlanc's character Joey Tribbiani and his attempts to make it big as an actor in Los Angeles, ran for two seasons from 2004 to 2006.
The show also starred Drea de Matteo, who had earned acclaim for her work on The Sopranos playing his sister, Gina, on the show. Paulo Costanzo, best known for starring in the teen comedy Road Trip, also featured as Joey's genius nephew Michael.
Broadcast in the same Thursday night timeslot that Friends had occupied up until its series finale four months earlier, the pilot episode of Joey debuted on September 9, 2004 with an impressive 18.6 million viewers.
Critical reception to the series was mixed. Reviewing the pilot, Newsweek's Marc Peyser wrote: "Let's be honest: Joey is no Friends. But Matt LeBlanc is as adorably dense as ever, and as his sister, Drea de Matteo already feels like family."
Joey's first season focused on the character's struggles after moving to L.A. to star in a sitcom that was subsequently cancelled. It would prove noticeably prescient.
Despite drawing big viewing figures for the pilot, Joey quickly began to shed viewers, slipping to an average of 10.1 million over the first season. That was due, in part, to the fact it was competing with the highly popular reality series Survivor over on CBS at the time.
Though NBC renewed Joey for a second season, it was moved out of the coveted Thursday night slot to Tuesday nights, where it once again ended up competing against a reality TV juggernaut in the form of American Idol on Fox. There was only ever going to be one loser.
Ratings declined even further, with second season viewing figures dropping to an all-time low of 4.1 million. In March 2006, Joey was put on hiatus. In May the show was cancelled, with NBC citing the low ratings.
At that point eight episodes of the second season had yet to air in the U.S. That was how it remained in the U.S. While the remaining episodes were broadcast internationally, in the U.S. they stayed unaired by NBC for nearly 20 years.
Now, almost two decades on, fans in the U.S. are being given the chance to get some closure on how things ended up for Joey.
For the first time, the final eight episodes of the shows second season have been made available to watch in the U.S.
The lost episodes of Joey have been made available to watch on the official Friends YouTube channel. NBC made the decision to start uploading the short-lived series to the platform earlier this year. That process has finally been completed, with all episodes of the show now free to watch.
Though it may not have ended up imitating the success of fellow sitcom spin-offs like Frasier, LeBlanc has no ill feeling about Joey's failure. Speaking in an interview with Radio Times in 2015, LeBlanc said the show was "doomed from the start."
"In Friends I was sharing a 22-minute episode with six other characters. In Joey the script was all me," he said. "It was a lot of responsibility. The pressure was so much, I remember feeling like an elephant had sat on my head."
LeBlanc said: "The writing and the jokes were OK but the conflict and the obstacles in the stories were not valid enough."