Now is the fall season of our imported content.

With the product shortfall caused by the ongoing industrial disagreements, platforms and providers naturally have looked abroad for material to acquire. The CW Network, which already has a trio of Canadian comedies occupying its Monday lineup, now brings you “The Swarm” on Tuesdays.

An oceangoing paranormal eco-thriller based on a 2004 novel by German writer Frank Schätzing, it’s an international production that, though it fits the CW’s history with genre shows, is not — in terms of budget, cinematic gorgeousness, special effects, extensive on-the-water and underwater photography or eight-episode run — what you would otherwise find airing on this second-tier broadcast network.

The story begins in Peru, with a fisherman in a reed boat; all it takes is a leg dangling in the water for John Williams’ two-chord shark theme to strike up in the mind’s ear. It’s not a big fish that gets him, though, but a school of little ones.

We move then to Vancouver Island, British Columbia, where an orca has washed up dead on the beach, eliciting the concern of First Nations marine researcher Leon Anawak (Joshua Odjick), who is already concerned that the migrating pods are late to arrive. And on Scotland’s Shetland Islands, in a lonely, weather-beaten station appropriately dubbed “the Rock,” Charlie Wagner (Leonie Benesch), attached to the Institute of Marine Biology in Kiel, Germany, is riding out a summer of busy work, a sort of punishment for being a rules-ignoring hothead.

“I like doing things my own way,” she admits to Douglas MacKinnon (Jack Greenlees), the cute local fisherman she meets over whiskey in the local bar.

Despite the fact that Wagner’s Ph.D. thesis involves the collapse of marine populations due to overfishing — fighting words in those parts — they’ll get, um, friendly and travel together onto a foggy sea littered with weird bits of algae-born frozen methane.

Although only the first episode was made available to review, notwithstanding the fact that the series has already aired in other countries, we know from the network’s own publicity that future installments will include scenes in which “deep sea crabs attack beaches, mussels block container ships, (an) unknown ice worm destabilizes continental slopes and triggers tsunamis (and a) deadly pathogen spreads into the drinking water.”

Though there are plenty of B movie beats and tropes in “The Swarm,” the execution of this first hour — slow to build, explosive in the end — is first rate. Money has clearly been spent, without the production calling attention to itself as “expensive,” but care has been expended too, on making the settings and situations feel authentic. And whatever verges on corn is redeemed by well-played, if quickly drawn, characters who make good company and are easy to invest in.

It’s impossible, of course, to know whether “The Swarm” will fulfill its early promise or go off the rails. In any case, it’s an excellent beginning.