Netflix Violent Black Comedy Fantasy Series Will Make You Believe In Imaginary Friends

Happy! begins with Nick Sax (Christopher Meloni) looking directly into the mirror of a seedy dive-bar bathroom before imagining blowing his own head off and dancing to a festive tune in front of a live studio audience while the contents of his skull spray all over the place.

This is how you are introduced to the series.

Shortly after this disturbing “fantasy,” Nick snaps back to reality, vomits blood into a urinal, and stumbles back into the bar, announcing that he wrecked the bathroom.

He immediately orders another drink, and walks out into the street, setting the story to Happy! in motion.

You may already be familiar with this kind of character archetype involving a substance abusing ex-cop-turned-hitman who only takes on jobs so he can continue living as recklessly as possible. Happy! takes this archetype and pushes it into extreme territory with Nick, who clearly has a talent for violently diffusing escalated situations and walking off nonchalantly as he looks for his next fix. As you would expect, his hard living quickly catches up with him after an epic shootout with a handful of mobsters during a botched assassination attempt.

Nick gets shot during this run-in, but suffers minimal injuries because he was dressed for the occasion with a bulletproof vest.

However, he suffers from not one, but two heart-attacks, resulting in his hospitalization.

Here’s where things get complicated.

While all of the above is happening in Happy! we’re introduced to the real source of conflict. A little girl named Hailey (Bryce Lorenzo) is separated from her mother, Amanda (Medina Senghore), and kidnapped by a deranged serial killer named Very Bad Santa (Joseph D. Reitman). As his name suggests, he looks like a drunk and psychotic Santa Claus, and he kidnaps children so he can store them in large wooden crates at an undisclosed location.

It’s revealed that Hailey is actually Nick’s estranged daughter, and she sends her imaginary friend, a boisterous and disproportionately positive unicorn named Happy (voiced by Patton Oswalt) to find her cop father, who she thinks is a hero of the highest order.

Nick meets Happy for the first time after ingesting a potent cocktail of free drugs in the back of the ambulance, and writes off the initial encounter as a hallucination. It doesn’t take long for Nick to come to his senses and realize that Happy is actually real, but only he can see him.

As ridiculous Happy!’s premise sounds, it makes for an effective kidnapping plot that’s extrapolated to absurdity when the surviving mobsters have reason to believe that Nick knows of a password for a set of encrypted files that crime boss Francisco “Mr. Blue” Scaramucci (Ritchie Coster) is dying to get his hands on.

Mr. Blue sends one of his trusted cohorts, “Smoothie” (Patrick Fischler), after Nick, who is being protected by former colleague and homicide detective named Meredith “Merry” McCarthy (Lili Mirojnick). Merry has to get personally involved because Smoothie threatens to kill her mother if she doesn’t obtain the information that Mr. Blue is looking for.

Happy!‘s ridiculous premise works ridiculously well on two distinct levels, which makes for a solid viewing experience. On one hand, you have a compelling neo-noir kind of drama full of intrigue and exploitation that seems more like a plot line to True Detective. On the other hand, Nick’s relationship with the titular imaginary unicorn drives the story forward because he has an invisible partner with a common goal that only he can see (or so we think).

The gallows humor found in Happy! is effectively driven home by Nick’s “mercilessly beat the hell out of anybody in my way, and ask questions later” tactics. While he’s grinding his antagonist’s face against textured walls before pumping rounds into them, Happy looks on in horror because he knows that Nick is, unfortunately, the only person who is capable of saving Hailey.

GFR SCORE

Happy! is not for the faint of heart, but it’s worth your time because I can’t think of any other series that falls into the “live-action/adult animated black comedy/action-drama fantasy” category. Like Happy himself, this series is an absolute unicorn of an experience. If you have a dark sense of humor, and the stomach for some over-the-top violence, you can stream Happy! in all of its perverse glory on Netflix.