The end of the world is a grand subject for online auteurs. Web videos —like the shorts on YouTube — are at once futuristic and crude.

It's no wonder, then, that a brave-new-world entity called MySpace TV has made tracks in online television with Afterworld, a $3 million conspiracy story that begins when a chumpy Seattle ad executive, in New York on business, wakes up to find that all but 1 per cent of the nation's population has vaporized. Gone, too, is all AC-powered technology. No cellphones. No BlackBerrys. No Internet.

The cause of the Afterworld calamity seems to be atomic, as a Japanese sage tells the hypersquare ad guy, Russell Shoemaker, that the phenomena in burnt-out New York remind him of Hiroshima.

Shoemaker will spend the balance of the 130-episode series on a vision quest, crossing the country using bootlegged transportation, in an effort to find his wife and child, dead or alive, in Seattle.

Shoemaker is represented in stiff graphics set against marbled backdrops that combine animation and live-action. In a tough-guy voice-over, he is not shy with gumshoe phrasing and clichés.

"Fourteen days later, the city was like a cemetery. Kind of place you didn't want to be at night. Felt like I was trapped in one of those nightmares you can't wake up from."

The production company for Afterworld is made up of television veterans based in Santa Monica, Calif. Maybe writing for a lantern-jawed character who wakes up in a crepuscular Manhattan brought out the Dashiell Hammett in the team.

In any case, this throwback talk serves to make the new medium accessible to viewers unfamiliar with video games and MySpace, an older audience still navigating the transition from CSI or even detective novels to online sci-fi.

"I'd watched enough TV to know that even the smallest clues were important," Shoemaker tells the audience, helpfully, as he finds some footprints in his destroyed hotel. "Nice to have my fascination with mysteries finally pay off."

When this mannered speech breaks — like a fever — what fills its place is sometimes no less comical. Some of Shoemaker's advertiser-friendly narration is way too contempo-casual for what ought to be an existential walkabout on a par with Camus, or at least

"Battlestar Galactica." As Shoemaker surveys the grimmest urban landscape imaginable, believing the world has come to an end, he muses: "I'd never had a problem with depression before, but I knew people who did. And there were things I could take to help."

At another point, he contemplates his strengths, trying to determine whether he's up to the task of surviving alone, crossing the scorched and ruined country.

He remembers that he was good at "spitballing" in advertising meetings and determines that his odds are decent.

In spite of infelicitous writing, Afterworld cruises along.

Each episode lasts two or three minutes and runs free of credit sequences or advertising if you watch on the generally well-oiled afterworld.tv, although on My Space, ads, including the banner type, constantly vie for attention.

What's best about it is the way it looks: charcoal, hazy, painterly, like nothing on television. To say the animation is rudimentary is an overstatement.

Often, when Shoemaker is shown moving from, say, the bottom of an escalator to the top, we see only two still images, faintly interlaced with tracers, as if the action were witnessed in a sleepy, almost drugged, blink.

This is not Disney animation. It's more like a strange series of digitally manipulated photographs. Afterworld is a comic book. It has a far-fetched story, frankly clichéd speech, a solitary hero, Marvel-style foreshortening and images that hardly move.

— NYT