Bad is good but not why not great? : Breaking Bad

Haven't watched a lot lately but now have seen most of season 3 of "Breaking Bad" and Bad is good. Not great, but a big step above the many formulaic oddball concept series out there: what if a woman had to raise money by growing pot (weeds), e.g. Breaking Bad (what if a teacher thought he was dying and raised money by cooking meth?) rises above the cheap concept level by treating the characters and their anxieties with real insight and sympathy. The chem teacher, Walt White, is a good guy who's made a bad decision. His wife is a good person trying to do the right thing. It doesn't, however, rise to the level of the greatest series like Sopranos, Wire, maybe Friday Night Lights, because the main characters are not grand enough to carry the whole show (cf Damages, The Shield) and the secondary characters are more like sketches, interchangeable. The plot is good, pretty tense, nicely paced, and the dialogue is generally strong, but again it falls short of greatness - it doesn't give you a sense of a whole world, it doesn't have the assured inside knowledge of the underlife of the drug dealer's world. It flirts a bit with cornball staginess, as the two sinister dealers (twin brothers, apparently) pursue Walt, coming closer to him in each episode, but they're characters out of a comic book or a dumb movie - nobody in real life behaves that way, with silent cruelty. On the plus side, the noose tightens very slowly around Walt, and he's increasingly driven to do crazy things to keep his family together, and it's interesting to see his brother-in-law, a DEA agent, very gradually piece together the truth about the meth manufacturer he's pursuing.