Review: "Time Will Tell" ('Warehouse 13' 201)

Warehouse 13, the determinedly middlebrow supernatural artifacts series, is one of Syfy's highest-rated shows. And while sci-fi series sometimes have trouble drawing a female audience, Warehouse's demo is something close to half female, thanks to elements like its mixed-gender cast and a format where the strange is followed through everyday America (not a starship or wormhole or bumpy-foreheaded alien in sight).

All that means Warehouse is a high priority for the network, which makes it that much more of a shame that even after a year of character and concept development, it's still the dumbest scripted series on Syfy.

When I say Warehouse is the dumbest show on Syfy, that's partly a tribute to the original series that Syfy's currently running. Stargate Universe, Eureka, and the rest are all fairly smart, and Warehouse 13 just isn't pitched at the same level.

The problem is that somehow, through some unholy fusion of odd-couple casting, uneven writing, and help-me-I'm-drowning-in-CGI green screenification, nothing on Warehouse has any weight whatsoever. It's all so much fluff. "Time Will Tell," the season 2 premiere (airing July 6, 2010) in which guest stars Roger Rees and Jaime Murray collude to steal a MacGuffin, follows the same formula as the preceding season: every scene builds toward a "but that can only mean --" moment, which all just drop to the floor like the plot chunks they are. The dominant facial expression is sudden realization.

I understand Warehouse is a dramedy, and there's supposed to be a guiding current of light humor through the whole thing. That's fine. The problem is not that it's a dramedy. Eureka and Doctor Who -- to name two -- have demonstrated in spades that even in a dramedy your crisis can still be, indeed must be, played straight, and have life-altering consequences. Warehouse doesn't have the hang of playing it straight, partly because the artifacts themselves are often stupidly played for laughs. If the central threat of your episode is the molecular-mass alterations inflicted on a would-be superhero by Charles Atlas's gym trunks, you've flushed your dramatic tension right down the pipes. The rule of dramedy is clear: Serious situation, wry response.

There's something intrinsic to Warehouse that keeps the stakes smaller than they should be. It's not the actors' fault, I think. Saul Rubinek and CCH Pounder, as boss Artie and Artie's boss Mrs. Frederic, are old hands with enough craft lend their characters an extra veneer of solidity. It wasn't that long ago that Eddie McClintock turned in a great performance on Bones as Brennan's only credible love interest other than Booth. But while I believe that there's more to Eddie McClintock, I have trouble buying that there's much more to Pete Lattimer than the childish meathead on display here.

As is often the case with shows that start out with a focus on one or two central characters, inaugurating season 2 means building up the supporting characters. The results are uneven. More CCH Pounder is a bonus. Latecomer Allison Scagliotti's Claudia started out as the scrappy fringe outsider (a lock of magenta hair -- shocking!), and now that she's become a regular part of the team there's a certain amount of what-now identity realignment that should be allowed to breathe over the course of the next several episodes.

But Genelle Williams, as the aura-gazing b&b hostess Leena, remains the show's weakest link. That was tolerable when she was a largely an enigmatic background presence in season 1. But Leena's increased prominence in the two eps I've seen of this season adds only pain and sadness. Every unbelievable line reading shoved me right out of the story. And the inadequacy of her performance is trumped only by the utter uselessness of her character. Leena needs to be written out.

Perhaps what frustrates me is that I do like Myka, Pete, and Artie. Pete is charming in the unflappable fratboy way lots of middle-America guys' guys are charming, and Joanne Kelly manages to create in Myka an overachieving woman who avoids the cliches of being a harridan or a secret softie. Artie is the best-realized character on the show, believable as an impressively smart operator who's been driven just a little closer to distraction by his very demanding job sitting on top of all these unpredictable supernatural objects. All three of the main characters have been fleshed out and given some development over the course of season 1, particularly Artie, and that's all to the good.

There's a lot to like about Warehouse 13, but it needs to tighten its screws. What the folks at Warehouse need to do is to study the efforts of their brandmate colleagues. Take a look at Sanctuary, which has its own problems but manages to depend on CGI environments that don't feel like you're watching live action characters projected into a video game. Then head over to Eureka, where out of the same kinds of ingredients that Warehouse started with -- sufficiently advanced technology yielding supernatural results, oddball characters protecting a secret government installation, etc. -- they've managed to build up characters and scenarios that have heft, and whose dry banter adds to the impact of a situation rather than subtracting from it.

You have it in you to be a better show, Warehouse 13. I'm rooting for you.