Syfy's 65-Episode Steampunk Series Deserves Credit For Being Ahead Of The Curve

Image courtesy of MovieStillsDb Published Sep 8, 2026, 12:32 PM EDT Cathal Gunning has been writing about movies, television, culture, and politics online and in print since 2017. He worked as a Senior Editor in Adbusters Media Foundation from 2018-2019 and wrote for WhatCulture in early 2020. He has been a Senior Features Writer for ScreenRant since 2020. Sign in to your ScreenRant account While SyFy’s sci-fi dramedy managed to last five seasons and 65 episodes, it is still clear that the series arrived at the wrong time now that the streaming era is upon us. CBS’s The Twilight Zone and Star Trek: The Original Series helped make the ‘60s a halcyon era of small-screen sci-fi, while Star Trek: The Next Generation, Stargate, Farscape, and Babylon 5 all ensured that the ‘90s were also an iconic time for the genre on TV. That said, the advent of streaming means that sci-fi TV fans are better served than ever before in the 2020s. Where the 2000s had a handful of hits, like the Battlestar Galactica reboot and Firefly, the 2020s have Severance, Silo, Dark Matter, Monarch: Legacy of Monsters, Foundation, For All Mankind, and Invasion, and that’s just on Apple TV alone. On Prime Video, there is the underrated Tales from the Loop, Outer Range, and the cyberpunk thriller The Peripheral. On Netflix, there is Stranger Things, Altered Carbon, and Sense8, along with the iconic time travel shows Dark and Travelers. There’s no shortage of ambitious, original sci-fi on the small screen, where longer runtimes mean that these shows can spend more time establishing complex lore and world building than movies in the same genre. As such, it is hard not to feel like, although SyFy’s Warehouse 13 had a good five-season run from 2009 until 2013, the show would have been better suited to this era. Warehouse 13 Would Have Thrived During The Streaming Era Essentially a blend of The X-Files and the earlier Indiana Jones-inspired cult classic Relic Hunter, Warehouse 13 asked viewers what it was like to work in the warehouse full of mysterious, potentially lethal supernatural artifacts seen at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark. As the show starts, its pair of Secret Service agent heroes, Pete Lattimer and Myka Bering, are annoyed to be reassigned to a barren wasteland somewhere in South Dakota, tasked with guarding the titular location. Working at Warehouse 13 seems like a major demotion to both agents, who are initially bored stiff by their new role. However, as they discover the secret hidden within its four walls, it becomes increasingly obvious that protecting the world from the contents of Warehouse 13 is not just important, but pivotal to the continued survival of the human race. This might all sound very dramatic, but Warehouse 13’s greatest strength was the show’s ability to bounce between various tones from episode to episode. Like SyFy’s later space opera Killjoys, which also ran for five seasons and also never received its flowers despite this impressive run, Warehouse 13 featured sci-fi action, comedic relief, and mystery thrills as the lead characters investigated the contents of the eponymous location further each week. Of course, Lattimer is a maverick who doesn’t believe in the rules, while Bering is a fastidious follower of the rules, meaning the show works as effectively as a fun police procedural as it does as a sci-fi mystery. Warehouse 13's Consistent Quality Means It Holds Up Well Today Like Fringe, Evil, and so many other hit shows that emerged in the shadow of The X-Files, Warehouse 13 takes the premise of a pair of agents investigating supernatural phenomena and makes it by turns spooky, thrilling, silly, and funny. Much like the aforementioned Relic Hunter, many of the show’s episodes focused on a specific artifact that was central to that outing’s plot, providing the series with a reliable formula throughout its 65 episodes. While not flawless, Warehouse 13 was consistently satisfying, and a re-watch proves that the show never lost its touch throughout its five outings. It’s a shame Warehouse 13 didn’t arrive during the streaming sci-fi boom, but viewers got a surprisingly large number of fun adventures with Lattimer and Beking back in the 2010s. Release Date 2009 - 2014-00-00 Network SyFy Directors Chris Fisher, Constantine Makris, Tawnia McKiernan, Stephen Surjik, Howard Deutch, Jace Alexander, Michael McMurray, Michael W. Watkins, Millicent Shelton, Vincent Misiano, Andrew Seklir, Eric Laneuville, Jay Chandrasekhar, Jennifer Lynch, Jeremiah S. Chechik, Ken Girotti, Matt Birman, Matt Earl Beesley, Matthew Hastings, Robert Duncan McNeill, Stephen Cragg, Larry Teng Writers Jack Kenny, Drew Z. Greenberg, Bob Goodman, Benjamin Raab, Deric A. Hughes, Holly Harold, Nell Scovell, Andrew Kreisberg, David Simkins, Diego Gutierrez, John-Paul Nickel, D. Brent Mote, Jane Espenson, Matthew Federman, Marque Franklin-Williams, Stephen Scaia, Tamara Becher Creator(s) Jane Espenson, D. Brent Mote