It does help to remember that Walter White is the villain of the story. Most everything he does is simply toxic. He has good intentions at first, but the series is really about him descending into a spiral of villainy where everyone is pretty much worse off for having known him. Even his "redeeming" action in the finale scars a couple of innocent people for pretty much life.
The show is predicated on dumb actions. Walter's smart, but he's unhinged. Everyone else is usually of average or lower intelligence, so their mistakes are understandable.
Gus and Mike really make the show stand out. They do great jobs and don't typically fall into the trap of doing dumb things (except maybe relying on Walter, who simply fucks everything to shit). I didn't like Saul at first because he seemed so one-dimensional, but he grew quite a bit (and has earned his own series).
It is hard to like the characters in the couple of seasons, and that's too bad. Skylar is portrayed as this vexing shrew who is screwing everything up even though in real life, she'd be completely in the right. Hank comes off as this swaggering tough guy, but he grows as a character as well.
Does Breaking Bad live up to the hype? The hype is so strong that probably no show can live up to it. But it's still a good show.
One thing that bugged me about it, though, was that some of the "foreshadowing" was actually misdirection. It's been a while, but I remember a foreshadowing that implied terrible things for Hank (badge in the aqueduct?), but it turned out he simply threw it in the water. And the plane explosion, while terrible, was an entirely different disaster than the pool foreshadowing scenes made it seem.[/spoierl]