Remember that last scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark when the guy rolls the Ark into this warehouse that seems to go on forever and it was full of all these other crates and you said to yourself or a companion moving rapidly away from you, “Boy, wouldn’t it be great if someone did a TV series about how all those other boxes got there?”That wasn’t you?It must have been the creators of the Channel Formerly Known as Sci Fi’s new series Warehouse 13 (9 PM ET). At one point a character describes the place as “America’s attic,” and it seems the creators rummaged around the TV attic to find this and that odd bit to create this series:Take the aforementioned Raiders warehouse, add a pair of federal agents a la The X-Files (Secret Service, this time; all the FBI agents already have series), throw in the chemistry of Bones and Booth, add a slightly eccentric answer guy (like Walter from Fringe—along with the cute African American assistant, the title cards and the cow), a retro-nouveau design reminiscent Brazil, Thirteen Monkeys, and Max Headroom, add a pinch of Men in Black and you’ve got Warehouse 13.Oh, and one other main ingredient: this show owes more than a passing debt to the syndicated series Friday the 13th: The Series (1987-90) about the heirs to an antiques shop full of cursed objects they must recover—things like a scalpel that allows a surgeon to cure anything but first he has to kill somebody who isn’t even sick. The agents of Warehouse 13 have to recover objects that “pose a threat to national security” because they’re, well, threatening (in the pilot, an Aztec “bloodstone” carving and Lucrezia Borgia’s comb.)
The first episode moved quickly—until the last half hour; the dialogue was clever and the acting was very good, especially for a pilot. The chemistry among the cast developed nicely and the characters seem to be more developed than your average television ensemble. There were enough hints dropped to suggest plots for at least a dozen future episodes, but… Without an overarching conspiracy or something to round things out, the curse-of-the-week format may wear a bit thin. But it looks pretty promising so far.
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