To be fair Walter and Martin are completely different characters on purpose. I don't think it's fair to compare to BB because it isn't trying to be BB. If anything I'd say it is a mix between BB and house of cards. But it replicates neither.
Well, yeah, because if they'd made Marty Byrde a high school chemistry teacher who gets cancer and decides to cook meth out of fear I think Vince Gilligan might have sued them.
But the parallels cannot be denied.
1) Normal suburban guy on the outside, running a criminal enterprise behind the facade.
2) Blonde wife who becomes complicit and cheats on him. Also inserts herself into the middle of the business but then wants the escape avenue. Hated by all.
3) Teenage kid who complicates the process
4) The Snells are essentially redneck Gus Frings.
5) Del (I hated that guy in the Sean Penn Bad Boys movie) is a little Mike, a little more Tuco. Lot of similarities in how they attempt to handle Marty.
6) Ruth? She's Jesse.
7) The stupid Langmore kids? Skinny Pete and Badger
8) Store money in the house? Walt put it under the floorboard and in vents. Marty puts it behind a wall.
There's no real duplicate for idiot Hank, but between the sheriff, the gayish fed and his chocolate lover you've got a decent composite.
Rachel doesn't really have a duplicate on the Breaking Bad side, but she draws a little from Saul, Huell and Lydia.
The overall concept is too similar for me not to compare the two. I also think it's fair to say that without Breaking Bad, this show never exists.
BTW? I'm writing a new show. It's going to be about a guy who owns a carpet store. He's married, but his wife is having an affair with her golf coach. Lesbian affair! The carpet store guy (his name is Steven) wears polos to work every day with his little name badge, but when he sends out carpets he's running the distribution network for a major heroin trafficking organization with ties to the Canadian cartels. The heroin is rolled up in the carpets. So he sells the carpets, they get the packages out and then the carpet returns to the store where he then can resell it at a lower price to regular peoples. He's storing bundles of cash at his house inside of a fake water heater in the basement and behind a faux block wall that is three feet in from the real wall. Affair-having wife is lonely (thus the affair) and bored so she steals some of the cash and "invests" it in a nail salon. Little does she know, but the new girls she hired are Canadian hit women on the trail of her husband because they suspect him of skimming. Not only that, but her new best friend is an undercover CIA agent.
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