I first watched Trainspotting as soon as it went to video so about 17 years ago at a guess and I loved it.

I've just binge watched Breaking bad and I loved it - I waited a while because I was worried it wouldn't match the hype but it did.

Now BB is epic and I've never been so emotionally involved in any TV programme or film in my life. In terms of scale it beats Trainspotting on every level.

However that's not a fair comparison. They both get the message across in a low key way using black comedy and a mixture of sympathetic and unsympathetic characters.

I think they are both masterpieces about the social disaster that is drug abuse.

The main difference as far as I can is that Trainspotiing takes less than two hours to make same point as BB which takes nearly two days to watch in one go. I think both work it's all down to preference.

Of the two BB has had the bigger impact on me but then I've only just finished watching it so I'm still a bit raw and I probably said the same about Trainspotting at the time.

They both worked as entertainment but IMHO neither will probably make any difference where drug abuse is concerned

BB was a masterpiece!!

Regards

King James

Maybe the quality of these things is that they don't *try* to change anything in regard to drug abuse; they just tell stories within the context of a drug culture - and let the viewer make their own mind up? Preaching in a drama is rarely an ingredient for an enjoyable yarn - but honesty and verisimilitude is. Trainspotting has both in spades - BB, whilst undoubtedly brilliant, perhaps less so.

I watched Trainspotting again earlier this week, in preparation for going to see T2 at the cinema. I remember when it came out, it got a lot of stick for 'glamourising' drug use - if those people had watched longer than the 10 minutes the Daily Mail had prescribed to sufficiently fuel their outrage, they'd of course have realised that it does quite the opposite; it graphically depicts the grubby, degrading and devastating impact of heroin use.

I'm not sure there is a way to critically compare the two in any meaningful way, since they're so different, but I would agree that they are both brilliant and affecting.

I watched BB when it first came to the UK on ABC channel, it got cancelled after the first season, then ABC disapeared, thank god for bit torrent, thatts all i can say, it was 21 or 3 years before it appeared on UK tv again

I remember that I bounced off the second season of Breaking Bad while it was still getting new seasons and episodes. Is the show complete now?