'HAPPY!' FEAT

Meloni wings it with blue unicorn in bizarre Syfy dramedy

FANS of Christopher Meloni used to seeing him as Det. Elliott Stabler on NBC’s “Law

and Order: SVU” — the role he played for 12 seasons — are in for a surprise regarding his new Syfy dramedy, “Happy!,” based on Grant Morrison’s popular comic book series.

Meloni plays Nick Sax, an alcoholic ex-cop turned hit man who teams up with a young girl’s imaginary friend — Happy, a winged, animated blue unicorn voiced by Patton Oswalt — to rescue her from an abductor dressed as Santa Claus. “I thought it was either going to be a spectacular mess or something really not seen before and pretty crazy,” says Meloni, 56.

The series is unabashedly bizarre, rife with operatic dream sequences and Tarantino-style violence. But none of it fazes Meloni. “I’ve humped fridges [in the ‘Wet Hot American Summer’ series] and I’ve peed in buckets on camera [in HBO’s ‘Oz’],” he says. “So the spectrum of what would give me pause is pretty wide.”

Meloni, who had a supporting stint as a vampire on HBO’s “True Blood,” says that filming his interactions with the unicorn meant working with a co-star on the other side of the country. “I would go into the booth on the East Coast and [Patton Oswalt] would be on the West Coast, so we would see each other over a TV screen,” he says. “I would just feed him [my] lines so that he could see what kind of energy I was bringing; what kind of tone and attitude. That was how we worked.”

“Happy!,” which premiered Dec. 6 (it airs 10 p.m. Wednesday), is off to a promising start as Syfy’s mostwatched series debut since “The

Magicians” nearly two years ago. It helps that Meloni is a TV mainstay, whereas Syfy’s other recent shows that struggled — “Incorporated,” “Dark Matter” — were fronted by unknowns. In that regard, “Happy!” marks a new chapter for both Meloni and the network. He’s also an executive producer on the show, and sees his career trajectory as a continued desire to do something different.

“As [I] get further along in my career, the idea is, ‘Well, I don’t just want to work — I’ve already worked in this particular arena of acting,’ whatever it may be,” he says. “What you see [in ‘Happy!’] is an actor whose collaborative energies were accepted by the showrunner and by the creator, and so I had a stake in the game.

“I also think the [TV] landscape has changed,” he says. “With all the enormous amounts of platforms for entertainment on your television screen — the streaming or regular TV — it’s opened up the opportunities to do varied and interesting stuff.

“I wouldn’t place [my recent career choices] over a blanket ‘genre’ kind of feeling,” he says. “I just appreciate all the chances that producers and outlets are giving storytellers. I really appreciate weird.

“I find it entertaining.”