> He did not look cool, he did not act cool, and the writers of the show did everything in their power to communicate "This man is a moral monster and a horror of a human being." Yet some people that I otherwise respected still identified with him.
That's because nobody starts watching from the later seasons, they start watching from season one. In the beginning, Walter White is an overqualified for his work, struggling to support his family on a meager teacher's salary, and then a cancer diagnosis kicks in. Everybody identifies with him because most of us feel like we struggle with unfulfilling work and with money issues, and then the cancer diagnosis is the cherry on top - how can you judge somebody who's put in that position? Who will leave his wife saddled with debt and put in charge of raising her kids alone?
Breaking Bad reminds us that in human psychology, first impressions have outsize influence over our perceptions of other people. Battered women stay with their husbands because they still see the caring individual their husbands were when they were first dating, and hold onto hope that somewhere, their husband is still that person; if their husbands were originally abusive in the first set of dates they never would have stuck around.