"The Wire" is certainly one of the all time great programs, dissecting the drug scene from the street to the governer's mansion in the Northeast.
I don't see much comparison to "Breaking Bad," which revolves around the meth trade in the Southwest.
Also, you have to kind of "get" Walt's position. A brilliant chemist, robbed of a lucrative discovery by a trusted friend, with a crippled child, a castrating wife, teaching school with snotty brats who make fun of him while he tries to make ends meet at a second car wash job, then being diagnosed with lung cancer.
Walt devolves from the middle class into the manufacturing and dealing scene, and because he survives by mostly luck and wit, he evolves and adapts according to its Darwinian codes.
He evolves from a different direction, however, coming from despair and anger at his relentless bad luck, a kind of "ghetto of the mind" causing an amoral implosion. He eventually begins to take perverse pride in his survival, since it appeared he was always committing a kind of suicide dive with his adopted life style.
Also, because Walt is basically middle class and previously law abiding, he becomes an oddball stealth king pin managing to stay just beneath the radar of the law.
There are so many memorable scenes from the show as Walt does his waltz of bumbling clumsiness and calculated brilliance.
There was the scene of the cartel assassin at the hospital, both legs amputated, who recognizes Walt mixing with the police at his hospital room window. He pulls out his lines, falls off the bed, and drags himself with bleeding stumps across the floor with a look of hatred on his face. Nobody knows it is Walt he is looking at.
There is a good part of an entire episode of Walt chasing a fly in the underground meth lab, and just hurting himself, but pursuing it with silly, dogged relentlessness.
Many of the visions of the despair and destructiveness of the drug life are also more harrowing than even what "The Wire" portrayed.
I think the gorgeous cinematography is as much a character as the actors, it is lean, mean and blazing beautiful, especially in hi def.