Off-the-wall series pairs private eye with winged horse

TV REVIEW

Whether it runs 10 years or 10 weeks, “Happy!” will go down as one of the craziest, most utterly off-thewall TV series ever produced.

Early in the premiere, the antihero main character, Nick Sax (Christopher Meloni) — a hard-drinking, womanizing, crude hitman and disgraced ex-cop — sums up his situation as: “My life is an ever-swirling toilet that just won’t flush.”

Complimented about the line in a recent phone call, Meloni seemed delighted.

“Well, thank you,” he said, speaking from his car, parked at a Los Angeles restaurant where Meloni was getting pad-thai before a back-adjustment appointment. “I wrote it.” Really? “This was an extraordinarily collaborative effort,” he said. “There was not a thing during the whole production that got bumped into by an ego.

“So I got scripts and I wrote things that I just felt were a clearer message, or felt right coming out of my mouth, or let’s say Nick Sax’s mouth,” he said. “... But really, (cowriter/co-director) Brian Taylor initiated the sentiment.”

Set to debut tonight on Syfy, “Happy!” is based on the Image Comics miniseries of the same name, created in 2012 by artist Darick Robertson and writer Grant Morrison. The story follows Sax, who is at rock bottom when he meets Happy (voiced by Patton Oswalt), a small, blue, ceaselessly cheerful winged horse.

Happy is the imaginary friend of a young girl named Hailey (Bryce Lorenzo). After being kidnapped by a demented man in a Santa suit, she’s desperately dispatched Happy out into the

world to locate Sax, so he can save her. Of course, only Sax can see Happy.

Meloni, best known for his stints on the dramas “Oz” (19982003) and “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit” (1999-2011), heard about “Happy!” through the normal course of affairs. He was “vaguely aware” of writer/director Taylor through the “Crank” action films (2006 and 2009).

“So I read the script and I put it down,” Meloni recalled with a laugh, “and I was intrigued, because my first thought was, ‘What the (heck) did I just read?’ I didn’t know what the world was, didn’t know what the texture, the tone, the attitude was. Is it ‘Sin City’ (2005)? Is it a dark ‘Who Framed Roger Rabbit?’ (1988)? I was like, ‘I don’t know what this is.’

“I spoke with Brian Taylor twice and, to his credit, he really couldn’t give me an answer,” Meloni added. “And I appreciated that. I just was seduced by his enthusiasm.”

When he’s not tossing back booze or sucking down pills meant to forestall yet another heart attack, Sax runs around killing people. And let’s not forget the show’s opening moments, in which Sax blows out his own brains and blood gushes all over the place, at length, as he dances to a Christmas ditty.

“A lot of the time we were thinking, ‘I can’t believe we’re getting away with this,’ ” Meloni admitted. “Then, invariably, whether it was me or Patrick Macmanus, the show runner, or Brian Taylor, someone would say, ‘Can we go further?’

“And we did.”