The flying cartoon unicorn isn't even the wildest part of Syfy's 'Happy!'

"The first note we got from Syfy said, 'Don't hold back, don't edit yourselves, go for it,'" recalled Brian Taylor, executive producer of Happy!, during the show's New York Comic-Con panel. "'We don't want you to do something safe. We want dangerous TV. We want something on the edge."

From here – two full months before the series' cable debut – it's too soon to determine whether Happy! will turn out to be truly "dangerous" and "edgy," or just puckishly obnoxious. But having seen the premiere episode, I can say for certain that it does not hold back.

This is a series that starts with a fantasy sequence of Christopher Meloni, wasted off his ass and blood pouring from his head after a suicide attempt, dancing to Christmas carols as scantily clad dancers surround him.

It only gets darker and weirder from there. Over the next 40 minutes, you'll see a little girl (Bryce Lorenzo) get kidnapped by an evil Santa Claus; two cartoon horses farting rainbows into each other; more blood-soaked mobsters than you can count; and an angel giving a blowjob to a prawn (okay, a prostitute dressed as an angel giving a blowjob to a man dressed as a prawn, but still).

And we haven't even gotten to Meloni's main co-star, a blue CG creature who looks like some unholy hybrid of a donkey, a horse, and a unicorn. This is the titular Happy (voiced by Patton Oswalt), the imaginary friend of the disappeared girl mentioned above. In his desperation to help her, he's turned to Nick Sax (Meloni), a self-loathing ex-cop who makes his living as a hitman.

When a dying character declares that "the world is run by devils," it's hard to tell if he's speaking literally or figuratively – whether this will be a relatively straightforward show with one fantastical element, or whether Happy is just the tip of an entire iceberg's worth of magical mythology.

(Or at least, it's hard to tell for me. It'll be much, much easier to tell for fans of the graphic novel, written by Grant Morrison and illustrated by Darick Robertson. That miniseries lasted only four issues, but the team behind the TV adaptation promise they've "expanded" the universe to introduce new plot elements and new characters.)

Either way, that seems to be Happy!'s worldview in a nutshell. The first episode is aggressively misanthropic. Every person we meet is a jerk, a loser, or a victim, and the institutions that are supposed to help them seem to be rotting from the inside out.

Even Nick is a hard guy to root for – though it helps that he's played by Meloni, who seems to relish the opportunity to play a nastier variation on his Law & Order: Special Victims Unit hero.

That's not to say this show is without fun. Taylor, one-half of the directing duo that gave us the Crank movies, knows all about manic violence and juvenile humor, and Happy! provides him plenty of opportunities to put those skill sets to good use.

When Nick says he uses his imagination to dream up "ways to inflict pain that won't have occurred to ordinary people," he could be speaking for the show's entire creative team.

A premiere episode is not a show, and there's every possibility that Happy! will, in time, grow into something deeper and richer than what the pilot had to offer. The series already seems to be charting a course there by the end of the first episode, teasing the possibility of a redemption arc for Nick as guided by the much more optimistic Happy.

That premiere, though, is all sour cynicism. It's the kind of nihilistic free-for-all that I might have found daring at 16, but mostly find tiresome now. If there's a driving force to Happy! beyond a desire to shock viewers, we haven't seen it yet. (Emphasis, again, on the "yet.")

In the panel that followed the Comic-Con screening, Morrison emphasized that Happy! was all about Nick's negativity versus Happy's positivity, "and the sparks that fly when the two are forced to deal with each other."

Taylor, meanwhile, promised that the upcoming episodes would be "a runaway train of brutality and perversion."

Make of that what you will.