Warehouse 13 ran for five seasons and 64 episodes on Syfy, from July 7, 2009 to May 19, 2014. It was created by Jane Espenson and D. Brent Mote, executive produced by Jack Kenny and David Simkins for Universal Cable Productions. It scored a 7.7 out of 10 with audiences on TMDB across 780 votes. That number is about right, and the reasons it is not higher are the same reasons it lasted five years.
Trailer, via Universal Pictures At Home.
Two Secret Service Agents and a South Dakota Warehouse
The setup is a punishment detail. Secret Service agents Myka Bering (Joanne Kelly) and Pete Lattimer (Eddie McClintock) save the President’s life, and their reward is a transfer to a top secret facility in a barren stretch of South Dakota. The Warehouse holds supernatural artifacts. They initially regard the assignment as a demotion.
Their new boss is Artie Nielsen (Saul Rubinek), a former NSA cryptographer who runs the place. The series has been described as “part The X-Files, part Raiders of the Lost Ark and part Moonlighting.” That is a fair description of the pitch and a slightly generous description of the execution.
The job is retrieval. Myka and Pete chase missing artifacts and investigate reports of new ones before those objects cause catastrophic damage. The structure is a case of the week with a filing system. The filing system is the good part.
Claudia Donovan Shows Up in Season 1
Allison Scagliotti arrives as Claudia Donovan in the fourth episode of season one, hunting for her missing brother. She joins the team as technology expert in season two. She is the show’s best argument for itself. Claudia is an expert inventor, and the character gives the Warehouse a resident who is genuinely smarter than the room and knows it.
Aaron Ashmore joins in the first episode of season three as Steve Jinks, an agent from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. Jinks can tell when a person is lying. That is a mechanic, not a personality, and the show treats it that way for a while.
Warehouse agents come from the host country’s agencies — Secret Service, FBI, ATF, CDC, DEA. The show is explicit that they are selected either for above-average intelligence or for an extranormal ability. Artie is a codebreaker. Myka has an eidetic memory and encyclopedic knowledge. Claudia and H.G. Wells are inventors. Pete and Mrs. Frederic get “vibes.” Leena reads auras. Jinks detects lies.
The Cast Carries the Case of the Week
Eddie McClintock plays Pete as the loose one, and Joanne Kelly plays Myka as the tight one, and the pairing works because neither actor is asked to be the straight man for long. Rubinek is the anchor. Artie is the character most likely to be written as a scold, and Rubinek keeps him irritable rather than cruel.
Scagliotti is the jolt. Ashmore is the steady hand. The ensemble is the reason the case-of-the-week engine does not stall.
Here is what the source establishes about the run:
| Run | Episodes | First aired | Last aired |
|---|---|---|---|
| Series | 64 | July 7, 2009 | May 19, 2014 |
| Season 1 | — | July 7, 2009 | — |
| Season 5 | — | — | May 19, 2014 |
The source does not break the episode count down by season, and neither will this review. What it gives is the bookends: the first episode in July 2009 and the last in May 2014.
part The X-Files, part Raiders of the Lost Ark and part Moonlighting
That comparison is doing a lot of work, and it is worth being honest about which part holds. The X-Files comparison is the weakest. Warehouse 13 has no interest in dread. It is a comedy drama, and the drama is usually about whether the team trusts each other, not whether the truth is out there.
Why the Artifacts Matter Less Than the Agents
The Warehouse is a containment facility, which means the show’s central tension is custody. Something dangerous is loose, and someone has to put it back. That is a procedural, and procedurals live or die on whether the people doing the procedure are worth watching.
Warehouse 13 knows this. The artifacts are props. The show is about a group of people who were chosen for odd reasons and have to work together anyway. Myka’s eidetic memory and Pete’s vibes are not powers in the superhero sense. They are personality traits with a supernatural excuse.
The weakness is that the show rarely makes the artifacts mean anything. An object causes trouble, the team contains it, the object goes back on the shelf. Five seasons of that is a lot of shelving.
The Verdict on Warehouse 13
Warehouse 13 is a good show that never quite becomes a great one, and 7.7 out of 10 is the honest number. It has a clear premise, a cast that likes each other, and a setting that does the heavy lifting. It also has 64 episodes of a formula it rarely breaks.
The comparison to Friday the 13th: The Series is instructive. That show had a similar containment premise and a similar problem: the objects were more interesting than the people. Warehouse 13 fixes that by casting well and letting the team bicker. What it does not fix is the sense that the Warehouse itself is a set rather than a world.
What matters here is the ensemble. The show was built to run on McClintock and Kelly, and it survived because Scagliotti and Ashmore gave it somewhere to go. Artie is the throughline. The artifacts are the excuse.
The show ended on May 19, 2014, after five seasons. It did not overstay. It also did not leave a mark the way its influences did, and it knows it. This is a solid, watchable series with a likable core and a formula it trusted too much.
Get the Notebook.
The day's best stories and every fresh verdict, in plain English, in your inbox by seven. One email a day, no more.