Definitely. I'm reluctant to talk about value in tv shows, because I find that I tend to get more out of trashy soap operas than most of the celebrated HBO dramas nowadays, but Rectify truly excels from an artistic viewpoint. It has such strong, rich characters, and such a fully realised cinematic vision to drive them home.
I think there was a tendency in Breaking Bad, by contrast, to take the cheap and easy road when it came to characterisation. The show often relied on style to cover for its more glaring flaws. I dunno, maybe they lucked out a bit too much by landing Cranston who dwarfed any actor in his vicinity, but then again the fact that James Gandolfini killed it as Tony never stopped The Sopranos from building a strong ensemble. I found a lot of the characters in Breaking Bad thoroughly underdeveloped. I know that this flies in the face of the reputation the show has accumulated, but I kept feeling it all the way through. Especially when it came to the prominent female characters who seemed to provoke rage in some less progressive viewers. Consider the threats Anna Gunn received for playing Skyler for instance. Obviously it's sexist bullshit, but I was surprised by the number of people who never stopped and considered that this was built into the show's perspective right from the beginning. Skyler was extremely unlikable for the most part because she acted as a self-centered antagonist to both Walt and other prominent characters. She was given very little agency and consideration, and you could say the same thing about Marie for the majority of the run. They were humanised very late in the story... which is arguably why Walt, right up till the end, had so many people rooting for him. It's funny you mentioned Mad Men because there's a similar case there (and for similar reasons) with the idolization of Don Draper from, I imagine, the very same group of viewers.
To his credit Gilligan seems to have realised this, because he has avoided the same mistake in Better Call Saul so far, where Kim has become a perfect counterpoint to Jimmy/Saul. She works as both the emotional center and the conscience of the story in a way that Skyler didn't, and she's one of the big reasons that Saul is a better tv show than Breaking Bad. The other one is that it actually has characters who can measure up to Jimmy.
My favourite thing in Rectify is the ongoing conflict between Daniel and Ted Jr, because even though you root for Daniel you recognise how wrong he was to do what he did. The show manages to communicate his guilt and Ted's shame at the same time, and even though Ted is every bit as unlikable as Skyler was when Breaking Bad started the incident leads to a greater insight not just into his character but the core themes of the show. The effect Daniel's assault has on Ted is transformative in several ways, both for Ted and the unique perspective the show adopts. There's a tendency to let these people act out their emotional arcs from their own point of views, and it breeds empathy regardless of whether we're talking about the pathetic life of the redneck who got away with raping Daniel's girlfriend or Amantha's identity crisis where you can sense that Daniel might not have been the only one whose life got put on hold for twenty years. It's the way a show like Rectify intertwines all these lives and stories, while a show like Breaking Bad is more about the glorification of Walt's one-man tragedy, that puts it above and beyond. They might drop the ball in the final season of course, but absolutely nothing I've seen from it suggests that they will.
