All those things came together last night in the first episode of SyFy's (do I really have to call it that?) appealing and surprisingly literate new show Warehouse 13. I'll admit I tuned in for the first time because I was charmed by Eddie McClintock's brief run as an unfocused F.B.I. agent on the second season of Bones, but by the time I turned off the TV two hours later, I was genuinely intrigued by the show.
I want to talk about the literate part first, because it's fairly unusual for an episode of a sort of happily low-budget show about a large warehouse full of quasi-magical objects, like Pandora's Box and Houdini's diary, and the Secret Service agents detailed to protect it, to center around an extended reference to one of Machiavelli's less famous works. But revolve around La Mandragola (The Mandrake), Machiavelli's nastily satiric play about Lucrezia Borgia's sexual apetite, it does. There's a lot of hokum of course, about a magical comb that inspires people to violent sexual frenzies, but the clues are there, in reference to a college student performance of a Machiavelli play that has sex and violence as its themes, a portrait of Borgia, etc. It's a very sly joke. Charlie Jane Anders over at io9 said in her review of Warehouse 13 that "judging from this first episode, the show's storylines won't bear much examination." But if there's that level of intelligence going into the writing, the silliness might go down easier, and it certainly will be worth doing to see what kinds of jokes the authors are inserting into the show and relying on for inspiration.
That's a sideline though. What I think has the potential to make the show a lot of fun is two things: the opportunities it's presenting for a group of under-employed actors, and its willing to be really idiosyncratic.
Actors first. C.C.H. Pounder is magesterial in the role of the mysterious Mrs. Frederic, an Internal Revenue Service agent from the fifties who somehow still looks middle-aged and is the force behind Warehouse 13. When she materializes unannounced in the office of a Secret Service honcho who is upset by her commandeering of two of his best agents, and he asks where she came from, she replies "Through a door," in a tone so grave it could be cutting sarcasm or the announcement that she's from another realm. Saul Rubinek, who has a recurring role in Tom Selleck's Jesse Stone movies, and whose next project is a movie entitled Oy Vey! My Son Is Gay (we're talking serious scraping for work, here), is strange and a little tender as the warehouse's keeper Artie, who shows up with the totally unexplained pronouncement “I’m sorry I was late, I was fixing the fish,” and works at a steampunk-inflected desk, complete with brass typewriter style keyboard and a two-way video communications system that comes in what looks like an Altoids box with the label worn off and was ostensibly designed by Philo Farnsworth, the inventor of television. McClintock, playing what seems to be a version of his Bones character has a nice, relaxed air, while Joanne Kelly, his opposite number, is so tense that even her dress shirts have wrinkles in them from being stretched a little too tight.
So far, they're all being given good lines to read. Watching the controlled and logical Kelly ask a suspect an increasingly absurd list of questions Artie has prepared for her, ending with "“Have you recently smelled something like fudge when there is no fudge?" is divertingly weird. McClintock's declaration that "I can take a bullet if necessary, but I'm not prepared to stop a dead Italian cougar," bridges his bravado and disbelief nicely: he's as aware as we are that the statement is absurd. The whole show is full of little details that subvert even our most absurd expectations: a teakettle that gives the wisher of ungrantable wishes ferrets instead, a suspiciously bouyant football straight out of Son of Flubber, an evil carved head with more space inside it than outward appearances would suggest. If Warehouse 13 can continue to make the tropes of the fantastical and strange surprising and witty, it'll be well worth watching.