It's fair to say that Breaking Bad had a pretty good 2013. It went from cult hit (the one box set you could confidently recommend to anyone who'd finished The Sopranos, The Wire or Mad Men) to being a drama that finished on a water-cooler high around the world.

The show's rise in popularity over the last few years speaks volumes about the way we watch TV now. After it was dropped in the UK by FX and Channel 5 (following their bold but ultimately daft decision to run the second series on back-to-back nights one Christmas), it was the powerful long-tail burn of DIY viewing options that allowed us to find Breaking Bad. Box sets, streaming services like Netflix and, let's face it, illegal torrents left the idea of a weekly broadcast looking outmoded; maybe the "all you can eat" model was better suited for such a moreish drama.

In the US, parent channel AMC saw viewing figures for their Sunday night debuts practically doubling every week in the run up to the final episode (surely an indicator of the snowballing number of new viewers ploughing through previous seasons to catch up in time for the finale). Here in the UK and Ireland we were also able to keep up (legally) thanks to Netflix's smart decision to allow UK viewers to stream the new episodes hours after the US transmission. By the end of the fifth season, this digital word of mouth meant that the box-set bingers were catching up in droves with the patient faithful who'd been hooked from the start, and Netflix ironically found itself in the position of effectively turning into a TV channel, drip-feeding the last of its product in old-fashioned weekly instalments once more.

Of course, it wouldn't have been the subject of so many cautious, spoiler-wary weekly conversations ("Have you watched it yet?") if it wasn't so good, if the story of Walter Hartwell White, a high school chemistry teacher throwing himself into a life of drug-cooking and violent crime after being diagnosed with terminal cancer, hadn't provided such propulsive, "just-one-more-oh-what-it's-2am-again?!" thrills.

The second half of the fifth series opened with the fallout from the revelation DEA agent Hank had after reading Walt Whitman's Leaves Of Grass on the loo (what a cliffhanger): his brother-in-law Walt was the elusive meth cook Heisenberg. It didn't let up from there. This was just the first in a series of payoffs to the questions that the show's creator Vince Gilligan and his team had carefully been planting since it began in 2008. Would Jesse ever find out the truth about Mike's disappearance, Brock's poisoning or Jane's death? Who was the ricin for? Would Jesse kill him? What was Walt going to do with the M60? When did he grow his Unabomber beard?

It's a great example of the economy at work in Breaking Bad's script: Walt's original inspiration to solve his money worries by getting into the meth business came from Hank. Walt's gamble that Hank was too much of a blowhard to notice – even though he was a DEA agent – told us so much about Walt's ego. As our sympathies shifted, it had to be Hank who solved the riddle, but it meant so much more – Hank knew not only what it would mean to Walt's family, but also to his own career ("Heisenberg is your brother-in-law?!").

Over five seasons, the time-lapse establishing shots – insects crawling through the desert, clouds shooting across the New Mexico skies – gave it a style and a widescreen scope, while outlandish elements that played like a hyperreal Sergio Leone movie meeting live-action Looney Toons – giant magnets, train heists, Tortuga's head stuck on a tortoise – were balanced by the simple domesticity of the set-up.

Breaking Bad's ending served to reiterate what the story – at its heart – was about: Walt. This was always a story about a schoolteacher, a family, a husband and a father with cancer. Yes, it's filled with indelible characters, making unusual, unexpected choices, all with detailed hints of their own lives (Ted Beneke using his "windfall" to splash out on a new car; Hank's obsession with rocks – sorry – minerals; Jane's drawings; Marie's kleptomania; Skinny Pete's piano skills; Saul's home-brewed interpretation of the law; Badger's insights into Star Trek), but without Walt's story, ultimately, they wouldn't have mattered.

This was an excavation of a life lived in its final moments; the mild-mannered teacher turned ruthless drug lord, spending two years on the edge after a lifetime on the margins. In scenes throughout the final episodes (the phone call to Skyler, Hank defeated on the ground, Jesse driving off), you could feel Walt's heartbreak, hubris, pride, shame, fear and anger playing across Bryan Cranston's face – often all at once.

And in that sense, Walt's death afforded the series a greater sense of ending, a more satisfying conclusion than we might have feared. You might argue with the details (would the remote really work? Could an M60 shoot through walls like that?) but in the balance of Walt's story it didn't feel like a cop-out, a twist or a clever final ruse. Really, we'd always known, right from the first episode that this was his fate. Walt would die – even if it wasn't the cancer that got him in the end, it's the cancer that meant he ended up on the floor of Uncle Jack's Aryan Brotherhood clubhouse.

The study of chemistry, Walt told us right at the start, is all about "growth, decay, transformation", and that's what we got. No terminal diagnosis, no reason to "break bad" – no reason to cook meth in the RV with Jesse, kidnap Krazy-8, hook up with Tuco, take on the cartel, watch Jane die, hire Saul, kill Gael, blow up Gus, kill Mike, watch Hank die, hide out in a snowbound cabin with only a barrel full of cash for company, poison Lydia, terrorise the Schwartzes, take on Todd and Uncle Jack, free Jesse – or die alone. "I did it for me," he finally admitted to Skyler. Breaking Bad certainly did it for me too this year.