Television is in a finale frenzy.

Ever since “The Sopranos” ended on a slyly ambiguous note that kept viewers deconstructing it for weeks, shows with artistic ambition cannot come to a mere close. There has to be a finish so big it sets off a tsunami of second-guessing. Once upon a time fans didn’t want their favorite series to end; now audiences clamor for a denouement they can debate forever.

People are already discussing the end of “Mad Men,” and the penultimate season concluded in June: there is an entire season to get through before the curtain falls on Don Draper and his cohorts.

And that kind of anticipation sets the bar pretty high for “Breaking Bad,” the hit AMC series that has seven more episodes to go but is already awash in premature post-mortems. In this era of binge viewing, audiences feel the need to purge — the blogosphere is clogged with comments, communion and speculation.

Anticipation is running so high that the show’s creators split the final 16-episode season into two parts. The first half left off last September with a kind of pre-ending: while on the toilet, the Drug Enforcement Administration agent Hank (Dean Norris) at long last realized that his meek, science teacher brother-in-law, Walt (Bryan Cranston), was the drug lord known as Heisenberg.