The Spoiler arose from the pilot for a proposed late 1960s' television program called Vendetta, in which a policeman left the force to pursue a private vendetta against a crime boss. Though Vendetta was not picked up as a series, the central idea was later re-visited by producer Robert Bruning. Bruning was approached by the marketing director of TCN-9; the network wanted a police program, but Bruning was keen to differentiate his program from the plethora of police procedurals then airing. Bruning settled on the notion of a vengeful former police officer.
According to Don Storey, in his Classic Australian Television, 'Bruce Barry plays Jim Carver, the 'spoiler' of the title. Carver is a Sydney detective who discovers that Sir Ian Mason, a leading respectable businessman, is head of a crime syndicate, and is kicked out of the police force because of his investigations that have so far turned up no evidence of complicity. His dimissal makes Carver all the more determined to find the evidence he needs to bring Mason to justice.'
Of the central character, Storey argues that 'Carver was a rough, tough character. When he needs information he often extracts it by force. He drinks hard. He's a womaniser, and he treats his women rough.' Storey also notes that the program became notorious for the quantity of nude and semi-nude scenes: 'A number of girls come into contact with Carver who end up in various states of undress, usually for no reasons of any pertinence to the plot.' Carver is supported by a sympathetic barmaid/sometime girlfriend, a friend in the police force, and an underworld informant.
The Spoiler was not successful: it rated poorly from its original airing in Sydney, so poorly that neither Melbourne nor Brisbane television stations even attempted to air it in a prime-time slot.
Summing up critics' responses to the program, Storey suggests,
The anti-hero was an aggressive, boozing chauvinist who belted the crooks and treated women like dirt, and was a sort of warring psychopath tolerated by the police and not understood by anyone. The show downgraded women, upgraded the law of the boot and took a dog-eat-dog view of society. There was very little for men to identify with, and certainly nothing to appeal to women.
While Storey acknowledges the legitimacy of these arguments against the program, he also suggests that the program might have been ahead of its time. The Spoiler cannot, however, be re-evaluated in terms of modern television, since the master tapes were wiped and no other copies of the episodes have surfaced.
