"Breaking Bad" vs. "Sopranos," the winner is ...

“Breaking Bad” returns for its fifth season tonight and I wish I’d never started watching “Breaking Bad.”

It would be better if I would not have gotten into it until July 2013.

Then I could feast without interruption on the whole series the way Val and I have for the past seven months. It’s swamped our lives the way nothing has since the birth of our children, Josie and the little re-run.

Really good TV and parenting have much in common: You fret over their futures, plan your lives around them, and you want to share what you love about them with everyone in your life.

We show friends pictures of our children; we send them links to stories from critics about why our favorite shows should earn their devotion.

It’s certainly been that way with “Breaking Bad,” a show that had been on our radar screen since it started winning all those Emmys after its 2008 debut.

That happens with lots of shows. You hear the buzz, buy the hype and decide to bestow an hour a week for maybe 12 weeks in the hopes it’s a keeper.

And it rarely is.

I point to “Lost,” a show with many cult-like devotees for reasons I understand. I was into it for the first two seasons then got bored with the absurd plot deviations and infuriating contrivances too numerous to name.

But it was a quality show, rich with compelling characters and stories, and I appreciated how the producers were setting the creativity bar high.

Still, experience had made me weary on January 1st when Val suggested we pop in the “Breaking Bad” season one DVD she’d picked up at the library. Here’s what I wrote about that day, my greatest TV viewing day ever, and my viewing habits.

Within 10 minutes, we were enthralled, an emotion that has only accelerated as we plowed through the first four seasons.

There’s never been a show as compelling, and that includes the now inferior “Sopranos.”

“Walter White makes Tony Soprano look like Mister Rogers.”

I’d source that line if my wife could could remember where she heard it. She’s consumed with reading everything she can about “Breaking Bad” as it resumes tonight on AMC, increasingly the best network on TV.

The more I watch “Breaking Bad,” the more impatient I get with people who, like I once did, say “The Sopranos” is the best show ever.

First of all, the Sopranos was maybe the stingiest hit show in television history. Here are the numbers: Six seasons, 86 episodes, 8 years -- an average of 10 slim hours a year. Sometimes more than 18 months would elapse between episodes. It was infuriating.

Supporters said the show was so creative they needed long lag time to allow their genius to flourish.

Hogwash.

The most creative show in television history is “The Twilight Zone.” It was on for five seasons, produced 156 wildly diverse episodes over five years.

The accolades seemed to allow creator David Chase to feel conventional storytelling didn’t apply to him. During his endless breaks, once vital characters would disappear and others would emerge without introduction.

It was very disconcerting.

Then there was Dr. Melfi. A great plot device in the pilot, she became a real drag on the show -- especially when they built episodes around her whiny neediness.

She’d be on a colleague’s psychiatric couch weeping to her nerdy shrink (Peter Bogdanovich) about her conflicting feelings over Tony and I’d be sitting there praying Furio would bust in the room beat both of them senseless with a tire iron.

Its greatest offense, of course, was the historically insulting conclusion, one so bad it made the much-criticized finale of “Seinfeld” seem bold.

James Gandolfini recently said his reaction to reading the last page of the show’s final script was, “WTF?”

I’ve never once found myself feeling impatient or critical of any aspect of “Breaking Bad.” Every scene, every character, every plot device rivets.

We had dinner with some friends Saturday to talk about the show’s return. He’s nurtured us through the series he started watching on Day 1.

He envies the way we’ve been able to gorge on the show and tells people who’ve never seen it to wait until the show’s conclusion and stock your house like you’re preparing for a nuclear winter.

“Then just watch it from beginning to end over three days.”

His idea sounds to me like TV nirvana.

With each plot twist we’d touch base with him to rehash the grim twists, hilarious betrayals and pending menace.

We’d tell him we couldn’t see how the show could sustain its greatness.

“You wait,” he’d always say with a knowing laugh. “You just wait.”

“Breaking Bad” returns tonight.

We just can’t wait.

Whitney, Petty, weed & Willie

Two of my favorite artists of the 1980s are famous for being prodigious dope smokers. One of them died Saturday and the other is Tom Petty.

I didn’t realize how much I liked Whitney Houston until her death. I’m surprised how sad the news made me.

Because for about five years from 1986-91, she was perfect.

Her voice was breathtaking. She was beautiful. Today’s divas make surly seem like a job description. It wasn’t that way with Whitney. Carbonated beverages weren’t as bubbly.

I never bought any of her albums or saw any of her movies, but I remember feeling a little jolt of euphoria every time I heard her sing and back then her songs were everywhere.

I guess I sort of stopped caring when she married Bobby Brown and started making tabloid headlines for getting high. I thought, well, she’s finished.

It seemed a sort of blasphemy to expose a voice like that to something like smoke.

I was right. It just got more and more sordid and pathetic ending Saturday in a bathtub at the Beverly Hills Hilton -- and if I was a celebrity who was fond of drugs I’d never set foot in a bathtub.

What is it about drugs that cause some artists to wither and others to thrive?

Take Petty. When it comes to marijuana use and promotion, he’s right up there -- and I mean up there -- with Willie Nelson and Snoop Dogg.

There’s his great 1994 stoner anthem, “You Don’t Know How it Feels.” Chorus: “Well, let me get to the point, let’s roll another joint!”

Even more emphatic is the obscure, “You Get Me High.” It starts out, “Let’s have another joint on me! Let’s get as gone as we can be! And we’ll float around the ceiling! Baby, you get me high!”

It’s a love song sung to a girl, but I’m confused about the real object of his lyrical affections.

There’s a segment in his outstanding “Running Down a Dream” career retrospective where he talks about how drugs ravaged the production of the 1985 album, “Southern Accents.”

Petty’s talking with evident sadness and consternation of the wreckage of drug use and saying how terrible and destructive to creativity they are. He then gets a mischievous glint in his eye and before dissolving into maniacal laughter asks the unseen interviewer, “You don’t happen to have any drugs, do you?”

The program later shows Petty mourning the death of heroin-addict bandmate Howie Epstein, 47.

I remember Mick Jagger saying something similar to “60 Minutes” correspondent Ed Bradley in 2002. Jagger said one day he woke up and realized he was sick and tired of always being wasted. Bradley asks when he came to that realization and Jagger, laughing just like Petty did, says, “After about 30 years!”

I often quote Willie Nelson when he’s asked about the effect on the crime rate if marijuana was legalized: “I know it’s kept me from killing a bunch of people.”

It’s an interesting time for me to be opining on the drug use of others because my wife and I are hooked on crystal meth.

We’re binging on “Breaking Bad,” the AMC show about the chemistry teacher (Bryan Cranston) who turns to crystal meth production after a terminal cancer diagnosis. We’re into the third season and I know when we catch up and have to go cold turkey we’ll suffer withdrawal until it airs again.

It’s the best show we’ve ever seen and it’s left me scared straight. It’s all over the headlines, too. Drugs are destroying lives.

Not everyone who smokes weed makes the narcotic jump to heroin or crystal meth, but the cops will tell you no one starts the latter without trying the former.

Conclusions:

• Drugs are very bad for some people. Whitney Houston said heavy marijuana use ruined her life.

• Some very cool people really love weed and other drugs.

• Writing about drugs is a lot more fun when you don’t have to think about dead celebrities and wasted lives.

I suppose the same goes for doing them.