Many people find Mad Men to be impossibly dark, and yet it’s Mary Poppins compared with its fellow AMC series Breaking Bad, which opens its third season Sunday at 10 p.m. Television doesn’t come any darker, but neither does it ever get better — and there’s still plenty of humor (albeit of the extremely black variety), as well as Bryan Cranston‘s remarkable performance.

Last season ended with Cranston’s Walter White having apparently lucked into solutions to some of his problems. His cancer was seemingly in remission, and the young woman threatening his anonymity as Albuquerque’s newest drug kingpin was dead. But other parts of his life were in crisis: partner Jesse (Aaron Paul) was a wreck after personal tragedy, and his wife Skyler (Anna Gunn) realized that Walter has been telling a series of lies about where the money for expensive cancer treatments has been coming from. The premiere deals with what happens when Skyler learns even more details about her husband’s secret life, and begins to set up some of the crises that will preoccupy Walter this season. Sounds emotionally brutal. I can’t wait!

Also this week:

Monday: Jessica Simpson’s The Price of Beauty (VH1, 10 p.m.): Thank you, VH1, for giving Simpson something to do other than serial dating. Allegedly inspired by her own problems with the celebrity media over her own appearance, Simpson embarks on a worldwide journey to examine the notion of beauty in other cultures. The first stop: meditation and skin bleaching (ick) in Thailand.

Tuesday: Justified (FX, 10 p.m.): One of the most anticipated debuts of 2010 stars Timothy Olyphant, best known for playing a sheriff on Deadwood, as a very different kind of lawman: U.S. marshal Raylan Givens, reassigned to his old hometown in Kentucky under murky circumstances. Walton Goggins, so great on The Shield, plays an old friend of Givens’s who may now be involved in all manner of bad deeds.

Wednesday: Scrubs (ABC, 8 p.m.): ABC decided to conclude this show’s first (and likely last) mostly post-Zach Braff season by putting a few episodes on Wednesday, where the success of the rest of its lineup shows why Scrubs is no longer really needed. The young med students we’ve been following this year have finished their first semester, but don’t count on learning what happens next.

Thursday: The Marriage Ref (NBC, 10 p.m.): So it’s a show about celebrities kicking around the marriages of “real people?” Why are we listening to anything these people have to say about what makes for a good marriage? Ah well. Jason Alexander, Cedric the Entertainer, and Martha Stewart are the panelists this week, so hopefully we will get a decent joke or three.

Friday: Kitchen Nightmares (Fox, 9 p.m.): The house of horrors this week is a Mexican restaurant in California, where Ramsay finds a kitchen badly in need of competent leadership. The restaurant’s owner seems well-meaning, but might need to come down hard on a friend in order to get things turned around.

Saturday: Healing Hands (Hallmark, 9 p.m.): Fresh off the destruction of two marriages, Eddie Cibrian stars as a janitor who survives an accident and acquires the ability to heal others with his touch, before discovering there’s a catch. Yeah, fate is unfair that way.

Sunday: Kirstie Alley’s Big Life (A&E, 10 p.m.): The newest entry in A&E’s Sunday reality sweepstakes follows Alley‘s journey through the wonderful world of weight loss. The first half-hour deals with her decision to start a program, while the second covers her search for the right personal trainer. Being out of shape has been a better career move for her than it has been for me, that’s for sure.