If you're happy and you know it take your heart meds.

Episodic TV; you can barely move without stepping in some of it nowadays. Having said that, we really shouldn't complain if only because the alternatives don't bear thinking about. There are many, many horrifying, tasteless and self-debasing things I would rather subject myself to than watch the seemingly endless streams of so-called talent shows, reality TV devoid of anything remotely real or honest or purported survival contests where the general public nominally decide the fate of those involved by paying a weekly sum of money directly to the production company via the twin media of stupidity and a mobile phone connection. Faced with the prospect of filling my eyes with lemon-soaked iron filings, I usually opt for the safer, more hygienic option of avoiding them at all costs and then bemoaning how indescribably horrible they are. 

Every once in a while though, one or another of the streaming services hits the nail squarely on the head (not in terms of reality shows, the only thing they need on the head is a bolt gun). You can drone on and on about Game of Thrones if you want, or The Walking Dead if you're absolutely determined on sedating someone for any number of nefarious purposes, but if I ever find myself with 20 odd hours of free time, I'm probably not looking to fill it by staring fixedly at a television for the best part of an entire day. Netflix smashed it out of the park with Stranger Things (eight episodes and out for Season 1, an extravagant nine in season 2)  and now SyFy got in on the short form act with 8 episodes of gleeful and barely contained chaos in the form of Happy!

If you've never read any of Grant Morrison's comics, you might be taken a little off guard by the sheer levels of violence and irreverence but if you've read any of his Invisibles books, you're in the right ballpark. It's not every story that starts out with its hero daydreaming about blowing his own brains out and somehow turning into a psychedelic disco number like Saturday Night Fever except the fever is some sort of horrible narcotic induced sensory overload and he's going to wake up smelling the slightly off meat stench of his brain frying in his skull. That's how we meet Nick Sax in the toilet of the watering hole that really doesn't want him there and it just gets more and more bizarre with every moment. Sax is not only a horrendous reprobate, but he also appears to be the smartest guy in the room as well as a bona fide killing machine. Imagine if you will, John Wick had turned to booze, developed angina and fired his tailor once his dog died and you're somewhere in the right region. Within the first 10 minutes or so there are four dead gangsters, a hooker covered in someone else's blood and the wanton consumption of seriously unhealthy levels of prescription medication. This is all before Happy the talking blue horse/unicorn/Pegasus turns up; the imaginary friend of little girl who's been kidnapped by a grim-looking Santa who need Sax to help find her. At this point if you aren't replicating Sax's very puzzled expressions you probably know something I don't.

The beauty of Happy! for me is that it doesn't take itself in the least bit seriously. Nick is an antihero of the highest order, grizzled and imperfect as a human but also prone to well-timed pratfalls and Tom and Jerry style slapstick; Sax's quizzically proud face when he realises that the ballet trophy he just impaled a guy with gained his daughter a first place is priceless. There are almost no real good guys. Sax is a disgraced ex-cop turned hit man with a failed marriage, a failing heart and an unfailing dependency on all manner of substances. Mary McCarthy is his former partner with debts to the mob and questionable moral fibre. Everyone else is either a gangster, on the take or a weird insect-costumed pervert with the exception of Happy and Hayley of course. Despite all this though, you end up fully invested in Nick as he comes to terms with his new-found daughter, his old relationships and the fact that basically everyone is trying to kill him for a password he may or may not have. The outcome is a shitstorm of bullets and weirdness that you just have to ride out to its very satisfying conclusion. 

Happy himself steals the unicorn's share of the good scenes though. Maintaining a relentlessly chipper attitude while Sax trollies around New York's criminal underworld being a relentless shitbag is just comic relief enough to keep everything balanced. There's a very real danger of it becoming too much, too cloyingly sentimental, but this is Grant Morrison so in never veers very far away from being crazy. If you can't corrupt your daughter's imaginary friend by getting to help you cheat in a card game for money and guns and accidentally give it a snout full of cocaine while you're at it, can you really say you're fully exploring the character? Similarly, Smoothie (who sounds like another cartoon friend but is actually the resident deranged professional torture expert) is a sadistic, creepy little bastard, but is also kind of likeable in an odd way and ushers in one of the best sight gags from the entire series that I won't spoil for you but had me clapping like a seal full of MDMA.

If your bag is grown women arguing with each other like bickering school children about whose husband is in jail for the worst financial crime or coming to fisticuffs over who got invited to the wrong party and is now acting shady, I suggest you Happy may not be for you. If you believe that the winner of a televised talent show hasn't been manufactured from moment one, scripted, dressed and squeezed into a mould by money-hungry business people, I suggest you should probably not have power of attorney over your own phone bill. If you truly think that the denizens of the richest suburbs of London genuinely talk to one another in small, camera-friendly clumps and always arrive at a restaurant, cafe or party at exactly the right moment to overhear the terrible secret that they should be the last person in the world to find out about, without the intervention of a raft of scriptwriters and directors, may I suggest a lobotomy. Otherwise, get Happy! in your eyeballs, you're in for a treat.