Walter White may still have to live in a state of perpetual paranoia, but fans of 'Breaking Bad' can rest easy.

AMC has reached a deal to extend its critically-acclaimed meth-drama 'Breaking Bad' for a final 16 episode season, the network announced Sunday. The agreement comes several weeks after renewal talks stalled between AMC and the show's producer, Sony TV, when AMC floated the idea of cutting the 'Bad''s fifth and final season down to six or eight episodes.

The deal ensures that 'Breaking Bad' creator Vince Gilligan will have enough time to fully chronicle Walter White's descent from chemistry teacher into a Meth-cooking drug kingpin.

"It's a funny irony -- I'd hate to know the date of my own last day on earth, but I'm delighted to know what Walter White's will be (episodically speaking). This is a great gift to me and to my wonderful writers," Gilligan said in a statement from AMC. "It's knowledge which will allow us to properly build our story to a satisfying conclusion. Now, if we don't manage to pull that off, we've got no one to blame but ourselves."

The AMC network has followed a trajectory not unlike that of Don Draper, the ad man at the center of 'Mad Men.'

AMC's first two dramas, 'Mad Men' and 'Breaking Bad,' have been showered with acclaim, and the network had a huge hit last fall with the zombie chronicle 'The Walking Dead.' But just as Don Draper's image took a hit in the fourth season of 'Mad Men,' AMC has been enduring its own share of troubles during the past year. A timeline of AMC's ups and downs is here, but suffice to say, controversies over of 'Breaking Bad,' 'Mad Men,' 'The Walking Dead' and 'The Killing' make for a change from a few years of glowing coverage of the network's rapid ascent.

Charlie Collier, AMC's president, has a theory on why some of these things are happening this year. In a Thursday interview, he said it's partly due to the fact that the network has "a higher profile" these days. As he noted, AMC has "been in the business a relatively finite amount of time."

Having a higher profile sometimes makes you a bigger target, a fact that Don Draper and 'Breaking Bad's' Walt White know well. AMC is learning that too. As Collier said. "It's very difficult to live at a time where soundbites are perceived to be facts."

In the interest of not just providing soundbites, I asked Collier an array of questions about challenges facing the network -- and some of those big-picture challenges preceded its recent troubles. In the interview below, Collier addressed the ongoing negotiations over 'Breaking Bad's' final season or seasons, talked about 'The Walking Dead' situation and discussed what the network's goals are in the long term.