It’s sad when someone who should be an expert on something reveals just how little they know about the genre on which they’re pontificating. Take, for example, Time magazine’s Richard Corliss, who on Sunday decided to declare that BIG LOVE had jumped the shark several weeks earlier. Unfortunately, he gets off to something of a rocky start by wrongly stating that everything from a wedding to a birth is an indication that a show has jumped the shark (as opposed to those being examples of, um, actual plot developments). But he then goes on to claim that the January 24th episode of the polygamy-in-suburbia drama jumped the shark by having Sarah take in an Indian woman and her child, Margene kiss stepson Ben, Alby begin an illicit affair and Nicki pull a gun.

Did a lot happen in the episode? You betcha. Was it a “jump-the-shark” moment? Not by a longshot.

What Corliss fails to get is that BIG LOVE is, at heart, a soap opera. As with any good sudser, there are the haves (Bill and his wives) and the have nots (the Juniper Creek crowd). There is a star-crossed romance (Margene and Ben), the slightly-unbalanced love-to-hate-her vixen (Nicki), a villain you hate to love (Alby, although he’s getting a run for the money in Zeljko Ivanek’s JJ) and a clan so intertwined that the family tree appears to suffer a bad case of root rot.

But most importantly, like any good soap, BIG LOVE is a show that knows a thing or two about plotting and pacing. To hear Corliss tell it, one might assume the events he mentioned came out of the blue when, in reality, most had been building for months and, in some cases, from the very beginning of the series. The budding attraction between Ben and Margene has been brewing since early last season, and Alby’s sexuality has been a timebomb waiting to explode since his first charged encounter with a hustler during the show’s first season.

A good writer figures out ways to have plots ripple across their canvas each week. A great writers knows how to accomplish that while at the same time laying the groundwork for episodes which bring several plots together for an episode which shakes every character on the canvas up and tilts the entire show in a new direction. That was what Roberto Aquirre-Sacassa, writer of the episode in question (titled, appropriately enough, “Strange Bedfellows”) did brilliantly, all the while introducing several new characters who would become key players in the weeks to come (including Sissy Spacek’s colorful turn as lobbyist Marilyn Densham).

Perhaps Corliss — who is a longtime movie critic for the magazine — should stick to the beat he knows best, as it appears he doesn’t understand the difference between the pace of big and small screen offerings. Then again, as the man who declared that Avatar presented an “impossible but completely plausible” world — as if those two words weren’t completely incongruous — it might just be that the plot-light, effects-heavy spectacle ruined him for, you know, actual scripted entertainment.

The subject of this week’s ‘Blogger Beat Down’ is… Newsweek writer Joshua Alston who included DEXTER in its list of “Five Failing TV Shows We Should Take Off the Respirator”

Our Take: Had this article been written last season —where Dexter learning about friendship had us learning about our PVR’s fast-forward capabilities — we’d be in total agreement. Unfortunately for the subject of this week’s ‘Blogger Beat Down,’ (and fortunately for us DEXTER fans) four episodes into the season have found ourselves rekindling our love affair with America’s favorite serial killer. Not only has saddling Dexter in suburbia with Rita, two tweens and a baby revitalized the show’s once trademark brand of dark humour, the lack of sleep facing the show’s titular character as he struggles to balance his job and family with his dark passenger has finally seemed to have caught up with him. Raising the stakes, and bringing with it two key components that have been missing from the show since Dexter took down Doakes in season two: A genuine sense of urgency and fear that Dexter might actually get caught. Plus, John Lithgow is such utter perfection as the creepy-beyond-description, seemingly amoral Trinity Killer that it more than makes up for the fact that his character’s shelf life will most likely expire by season’s end.

The subject of theTVaddict.com’s inaugural BLOGGER BEAT DOWN is… TV.com writer Richard Lawson, who in a recent editorial claims that “MODERN FAMILY’s kid characters almost ruin the show.” How much do they bother the scribe? “To be blunt,” he admits, “I just really hate the kids.”

Our Take: While Lawson points out that it’s not exactly realistic for pre-teen Alex to ask her beautiful step-grandmother about her sex life — let alone for 10-and-three-quarters Manny to offer up sound parenting advice to Claire — we’d like to remind him that… um, FAMILY is a comedy. Is it any more realistic for Ed O’Neill’s curmudgeonly alter ego to purposely fly a plane into his son-in-law? Heck, for that matter it seems pretty unlikely that Julie Bowen’s Claire would settle down with a guy like Ty Burrell’s Phil! But see, there’s this thing called “suspension of disbelief” that is at the heart of all good comedy. It’s what allows us to believe that Jerry, Elaine, George and Kramer would ever be friends, or that Sam Malone would be helplessly drawn to Diane Chambers. And frankly, when it comes to annoying kids on network television shows, we’ll take any of the FAMILY brood as opposed to the cloying kids who populated FULL HOUSE or pretty much any kid who has ever appeared on any show on the Disney Channel.

Next Up: The genius at Newsweek who thinks our favorite serial killer, DEXTER, needs to get the axe. Stay Tuned…