It’s that time of year again, the kids are off from school, Christmas is over, fall finales have long since passed and every publication under the sun is compiling their “year in review” articles. Now is when we celebrate the best in the year of TV.

It’s time for the third annual My TV Awards.

The concept of the “television season” permanently altered by summer runs of shows from Mad Men to Big Brother, we here are My TV choose to acknowledge anything and everything that aired within the confines of 2009, from January to December. That means that for many network shows the episodes in consideration are not necessarily from the same season. But it also means that cable offerings are given equal consideration, even if they don’t adhere to the network season. For example, our 2009 nominations include acknowledgement of the back half of How I Met Your Mother‘s 4th season and the front half of its 5th; we considered Glee’s first batch as well as Eli Stone’s last and Drop Dead Diva‘s entire Summer/Fall run made the time cutoff. In tricky cases like that of Friday Night Lights, we are taking into consideration its NBC run (because Direct TV is not available to much of our writing staff), so it’s a full season 3 on trial instead of a partial season 4.

We have also added and expanded our categories this year. “Best Reality Star” and “Best Guest Star” have been expanded to include both male and female categories. We’ve added categories to acknowledge technical achievement in production, strong variety performances and dynamic late night personalities as well as our favourite TV couples, the best new shows and the saddest cancellations of the year.

So stayed tuned in the coming days as we unveil our nominations for the best of TV in 2009. There are 35 categories of 6 nominees each. Please post in the comments your thoughts on the nominees and email us to vote for your favourites (kelly@mytvblog.ca).

The winners will be announced in the New Year.