I watched this in a series of three-minute snippets on Australia’s Sci-Fi Channel. It had previously debuted on the internet, on YouTube and BudTV, but I almost always miss this kind of coolness when it comes out online -- I really should start reading some of the Forwards people send me. Then maybe I won’t be so out of the loop on stuff. Awesome stuff, like this.

This series followed the goings on of a select few humans left alive after some mysterious calamity that simply… dissolved 99% of the people on the planet. One day, Russell Shoemaker was just your average IT guy on the road in New York, about to make it big; the next, he is one of the few survivors in a massive city gone eerily silent. He soon embarks on a desperate journey to get home to his family in Seattle, and along the way picks up puzzle pieces as to what has happened to the world, who might be responsible, and what could possibly be the point of it all.

All the while he wonders: is his family still alive?

For months, this show was the highlight of my day. I kid you not. I would get home, and there, in my DVR queue, would be the latest installment of Russell’s post-Apocalyptic adventure. I’d click on it avidly, and for three minutes be absolutely swept up in the drama, the wry humor and the enigma of it all; even though it was only three minutes, each episode delivered more entertainment than an hour of most other shows on television at any given time.

Yes, I am aware that I could have gone to my computer and watched the whole show in a sitting on MySpace or something at that point, but I enjoyed the anticipation, and I loved my daily halcyon dose of Afterworld so much that I wanted it to last as long as possible.

Oh, it was hardly a wonder of computer animated imagery. The series is CGI, but told in a very stop motion manner, like it’s a picture book with narration and the occasional voice actor. Even the lamest of motion comics is more sophisticated than this particular effort, and the photorealism of the series will never be considered… well, terribly real.

But that is so not important in the scheme of this endeavor. It’s not about whether or not faces convey the proper emotion, whether or not you can see each individual strand of hair or whether the background is rendered in painstaking detail. This is a show about a world gone mad, about the possible dangers of unchecked progress, about the ruthlessness of shadowy power-mongers and the realization that we are all of us probably as ill-equipped as Russell to survive in a world without the technological marvels we have come to take for granted.

You see, the disappearance of the bulk of the population was either caused by, or happened in conjunction with, the release of one of the ever-so-popular EMP bursts we see nowadays. EMPs, or electromagnetic pulses, are a big deal in dystopian science fiction: the folks in Dark Angel are inconvenienced by one mightily; Neo and the gang use theirs to take on the machines who want to control humanity; in TNT’s new series Falling Skies, the invading aliens employed an EMP to render humanity helpless against them. No electricity, no computers. No computers, no bombs. It’s a pretty simple equation.

For Russell and the other survivors, this EMP is even worse because it even disabled cars. Cars! It’s all very upsetting. And without the trappings of civilization, things start to fall apart. Fast. Before Russell even has time to grow a beard we have been reduced to a hunter-gatherer society in which superstition is rife, the strong exploit the weak and survivors guilt coupled with PTSD has pretty much sent everyone around the bend. Also, there are mutants.

It is the first person character of Russell that really sets this series apart. Voiced impeccably by the dulcet tones of Roark Critchlow (most recently seen in V), he is an everyman, but an outstanding one. He doesn’t know what he’s doing at all – it’s the end of the world, and his most practical skill he seems to have is that he’s very good at not dying – but he always tries to do the right thing, even if it means things are going to end up going very wrong for him indeed. In three minute increments, somehow Russell gets more character development than most of the cast of Stargate Universe got in an entire season, and as he comes to be known as The Walker and turns into something of a folk hero to the scattered survivors of Afterworld, he likewise becomes one to us.

While it’s true that, despite the section of our magazine in which this review resides, this show is not technically available on DVD -- unless you make your own set -- you can still find the entire series all over the place, including Vuze, Veoh, MySpace and, of course, YouTube.

Enjoy the first episode here:


But before you start your journey with Russell, a word of warning. You will find, at the end of the 130 episodes, that events come to a rather abrupt halt. Oh, we’ve had some questions answered and have been left to draw some important conclusions of our own, but sadly, and for some unfathomable reason, Afterworld never saw a Season 2. It just comes to a vaguely cliffhanger-y end, and that is all. But I still say it’s worth a few hours of your time, and highly, highly recommend you check this one out.

Three minutes at a time.

   -- Rachel Hyland