Amy Poehler and Adam Scott in the series finale of “Parks and Recreation.” PHOTOGRAPH BY COLLEEN HAYES/NBC

Last night, as “Parks and Recreation” aired its finale, my blunt and funny fellow TV critic Willa Paskin, who writes for Slate, tossed out a tweet: “Parks and Rec is a very great show, but this finale is making me gag.”

I didn’t want to agree, but I did. Even for a preternaturally sweet sitcom, the hourlong final episode tilted into treacly, a cascade of damp-eyed goodbyes. For the finale, Mike Schur and his writing team had adopted the “Six Feet Under” method, only without so much death: a series of flash-forwards, providing closure, but few laughs. Donna was happily married, in Seattle, and, after some globe-trotting sybaritic adventures, had became a wealthy philanthropist. Tom briefly failed in business, then became a nationwide celebrity with a book about failure. Ron retired, a rich man, and took a peaceful gig running Leslie’s national park. Andy and April had a brief conflict over whether to have kids, then had kids. Ben and Leslie had a brief conflict over who should run for governor, then Ben ceded to Leslie. Garry (or maybe Larry) was a terrific mayor who died happy, with billions of grandchildren. Even prickly Craig got married to Typhoon, the hairdresser. Every single character was married to the love of his or her life, healthy, economically secure, and satisfied by work: not a cloud in this sunny sky.

There's nothing wrong with a crowd-pleaser, of course, and maybe I should just give in and get pleased. Since the show shifted gears in its second season, “Parks and Recreation” had always been a defiantly optimistic production, a humanistic reinvention, as I wrote in a column a few years back, of the nihilistic comic genius of the British version of “The Office.” A gooey finale doesn’t erase the greatness of the eleven episodes that preceded it—the truncated final season of a show so low-rated that its creators had written every season finale as a potential series finale. Each week, to fan frustration, NBC cruelly underplayed the show’s end, burning off the final run of what had once been one of the greatest comedy lineups aired on network television: “Community,” “The Office,” “30 Rock,” and “Parks and Recreation.” Arriving at a clip of two episodes a week, and set in 2017, these final installments of “Parks” were universally smart and warm, but they were also ambitious. The jokes were packed so neatly and precisely that it was like watching a figure skater pull off a quadruple lutz. In the show’s best tradition, the writers wrote their characters with love, yet they also managed to comment on the world around them, using satire that was sophisticated and pointed but never cruel. The best such story arc involved a Google-like company called Gryzzl; it nailed the cultish Silicon Valley culture better than any show out there, including “Silicon Valley” and “The Good Wife.” Not for nothing, it was also hilarious.

TV pilots are a bizarre art form: they’re half ad pitch, under gruesome pressure to sell to viewers and executives alike. They only rarely suggest much about the show that follows. But finales have it even worse, especially in the age of social media. Arriving after years of devotion, any finale, but especially a finale of a true fan favorite, endures pressures beyond mere storytelling, the kind of thing academics call “extra-diagetic and paratextual” factors: the story itself is framed by our awareness of the booming careers of once unknown actors, the writers’ nostalgia for the jobs they’re about to lose, not to mention the destabilizing, “Misery”-level desires of the show’s true devotees. These are passions that might scare anyone off taking too great a risk. (Creators may care about the critics, too, but we’re small beer.) Who wouldn’t want to go out like “Six Feet Under”? That was the only recent finale that didn’t result in the showrunner fleeing, either literally or figuratively, to the South of France.

The problem, for me, was that the “Parks and Recreation” finale felt less like “Six Feet Under” and more like “Lost,” with its loving interfaith church and sideways universe of therapized family love. It papered over every difficulty in a way that felt less like resolution than a cheat—adopting an almost cult-like insistence on perfect happiness in life, and happiness in a particular mold. The strength of “Parks and Recreation” has always been its openness to emotion, but an honest version of that might be able to incorporate more difficult feelings, too (not to mention Tom’s inevitable divorce!). Even wonderful people experience sickness, sadness, and boredom. I guess I should have known that things would go down this way after the show began to eliminate the one exception to the ensemble’s generosity: its ongoing cruelty to Jerry (otherwise known as Terry, or whatever he was called at the end). In proudly nice Pawnee, Garry was the nerd they bullied, for no real reason—and it was a mark of secret toughness, and the show’s willingness to endure ambiguity, that this odd plot endured over the seasons.

Yet, in the end, they appointed Larry mayor and cried at his funeral, as though nothing ever happened. I’m sure I'm in the minority, but I guess I’d hoped for something odder, rawer, deeper, wiser in the final round—and also just smaller, maybe. I missed the way the show used to acknowledge that Leslie Knope’s decency didn't entirely override the dirtier parts of public service, like the snobs in Eagleton and the corruption of Councilman Jamm, radio shows hosted by the Douche and TV shows featuring the Gotcha Dancers. Her own small flaws (her monomaniacal nature, her little blind spots) didn’t make her any less decent. Maybe I'm just another crank, a voter who can never be satisfied, but I would like to have seen them show the possibility of happiness without success in every area.

Still, I doubt I'll remember my own doubts, in the end. “Parks and Recreation” built up so much good will over the years that even this overly gooey finale ultimately earned from me a pretty gooey response: we'll always have Pawnee. A finale is just a finale, and the rest of the show—seven seasons more than expected, a hundred and twenty-five episodes total—still exists, to be watched again and again. It's not the kind of show to let disappointment linger. Anyway, as Ron Swanson might put it, “There has never been a sadness not cured by breakfast food.”