Gaslighting / Live-Action TV

Gaslighting in Live-Action TV series.

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By Creator:

• Derren Brown:
  • In Apocalypse, a Channel 4 special, the crew uses this on their unsuspecting volunteer, Steven, to make him think that a meteor strike is imminent.
  • On the Guilt Trip episode of Derren Brown's Experiments, Derren Brown used this technique as part of his experiment to see if he could get an ordinary person to think he might have committed murder. He had him unknowingly invited to a "conference" for a weekend that was populated entirely by actors, and they would start by switching ties or jackets when he wasn't looking, and at dinner, they distracted him so that they could switch his plate and glass a few times, and at one point even moving and replacing the furniture outside the conference room and planting a "stolen" necklace in the mark's hotel room just to mess with the mark. They also used other psychological tricks to induce feelings of guilt whenever he heard a bell and carried his bed outside one night to the location where the "corpse" of someone who had been rude to him was found so that he had hazy memories of being there. The combination worked so well that when somebody who had been obnoxious to him was apparently discovered dead, he went to the nearby "police station" to turn himself in.

By Title:

• 3-2-1 Contact had a "Bloodhound Gang" story called "The Case of the Cackling Ghost" where an old woman, despite not believing in the supernatural, was experiencing strange and frightening goings-on with a strange cackling ghostly sound coming out of her radio and apparent appearances of a ghost on her estate that seem linked to a necklace in her possession with a purported curse that says the owner would go mad. The Gang investigates and exposes the events as this trope, coupled with a "Scooby-Doo" Hoax, perpetrated by her villainous nephew to get the necklace for himself.
• In 7th Heaven, Annie Camden was becoming emotionally distressed that the twins would not call her "mommy", yet repeatedly called Ruthie "mommy". Turns out, Ruthie managed to somehow teach them how to call Ruthie their mommy (in a manner similar to how a Sea World trainer teaches aquatic animals tricks) as a prank for Annie.
• The Adventures of Superman:
  • In one episode this was apparently being done to Jimmy Olsen. Items were moved around in his house and the painting in the living room kept changing. Ultimately, the gaslighting was unintentional, the result of burglars using his house to stash stolen goods while he wasn't there.
  • In another episode, Perry White starts seeing Julius Caesar's ghost (a play on his Catchphrase "Great Caesar's Ghost!"). It turns out to be a ploy to undermine his credibility as a witness in an upcoming gangster trial. Superman saves the day by gaslighting the gangster into believing the ghost of a crook he betrayed had come back to haunt him.
• All My Children. Janet Green hires an actor who looks exactly like Dixie Martin's dead brother Will (who Janet murdered) to terrorize her. It works until another character runs into Will and mentions it to Dixie, who realizes that she isn't going crazy.
• American Horror Story:
  • In American Horror Story: Murder House, malevolent ghosts do this to Vivien, in order to get custody of her about-to-be-born baby taken from her and given to her husband, so they can more easily steal the baby. The ghosts are real, but intentionally either appear only to Vivien or convince the other characters to lie when asked about seeing them.
  • In American Horror Story: Double Feature, this happens in the fittingly named episode "Gaslight", where Harry, Alma and Ursula use drugs and lies to keep Doris, who has just given birth and is growing increasingly suspicious oblivious to what's really happening around her.
• Angel::
  • Wolfram & Hart does a variant of this in "Dear Boy", using the recently resurrected Darla to tease Angel, making his friends think he's lost it.
    Wesley: Vampires don't come back from the dead.
    Angel: I did. And I saw her. I'm not crazy!
    Wesley: Where?
    Angel: Right between the clown and the big, talking hot dog.
  • In "Soul Purpose", Eve infects Angel with a parasite that leaves him bedridden with hallucinations. After he manages to remove it, Eve walks into the room and infects him again while telling him he's still dreaming. Later when her plan fails she changes her clothes and tries to pass the incident off as another hallucination, but Angel sees through it when he realises she didn't change her earrings.
• In the Arrested Development episode "My Mother The Car," Lucille crashes her car with Michael riding shotgun, giving him a head injury. She spends the rest of the episode trying to convince him the crash was his fault, giving him a Tap on the Head whenever he starts to remember the truth, all while being an extremely eerie Stepford Smiler "caring mom" to her injured son.
• In the episode of The Avengers (1960s) "The House that Jack Built", Emma is trapped in a house that is an elaborate psychological maze, built by a now-dead businessman who had too much free time, too much money, and one hell of a grudge against her. A recorded message he leaves flat-out states that the intention is to drive her insane and eventually to suicide.
• Babylon 5:
  • In the episode "Passing Through Gethsamane", a group of people do this to Brother Edward, who is actually a former serial killer subjected to Death of Personality for his crimes, and doesn't know it. They use a bloody message on a wall (made with the future equivalent of disappearing ink), speakers carefully hidden in walls, and a Centauri telepath to "trigger" a fake memory.
  • A later episode, "Intersections in Real Time", has Captain Sheridan being subjected to this by an interrogator who wants to convince Sheridan that he's guilty of conspiracy and treason to undermine Earth for the aliens. Techniques include arbitrarily declaring that it is different times of day during the same conversation and subjecting Sheridan to a variety of Ambiguous Situations, some or all of which may have been faked for his benefit.
• Barry: Barry casually offers to drive a powerful woman who mistreated Sally insane by doing things such as switching her dog for another and taking pictures of her while asleep he'd send later. She reacts realistically in horror and orders him to get away from her.
• Being Human (UK) has Nina being forced to do this to a social worker, to cover for the fact that they don't really have the official documents to let them look after "Uncle Billy" (an amnesiac Herrick). To get rid of the social worker, Nina yells at her and pretends that the worker was negligent and irresponsible and basically tricks her into thinking leaving the house in peace was a favor. To be fair it was really important that "Uncle Billy" stay with them since they were the only ones who knew he was a murderous vampire and everyone felt really bad about driving the social worker to tears. (Annie even teleports into her car to leave her some tissues.)
• Better Call Saul: After hearing that Chuck wrestled the Mesa Verde case from Kim, he gets back at Chuck by stealing the files on the case and replacing them with doctored copies that have the address numbers changed. This makes Chuck (and by extension, his firm, HHM) look foolish in the application meeting with Mesa Verde and holds up the case for six weeks, as he vehemently assures them the documents stated the address as 1216 instead of 1261 (the real address number), resulting in the Mesa Verde clients going back to Kim. Chuck quickly and correctly realizes Jimmy sabotaged him and how he did it, but he has no proof to convince anyone (except Kim, who is not happy Jimmy did this for her, but she doesn't give Chuck the satisfaction of knowing she believes him), since Jimmy was thorough in removing anything that would incriminate him (such as paying off the printer shop cashier where he doctored the files to say he had never seen Jimmy before), making Chuck seem like he's being crazy and irrational.
• The Bold and the Beautiful:
  • Crazed murderer Sheila Carter swaps Stephanie Forrester's calcium tablets for mercury pills, then manages to break into her home and either shift things around or steal them and later return them. Stephanie's resulting erratic behavior has herself and her loved ones wondering if she's becoming senile or outright cracking up.
  • Sheila herself was a victim of this. Enraged when her husband James dumps her for Sheila, Maggie begins piping recordings into Sheila's home of her many victims.
• Buffy the Vampire Slayer:
  • In "Gone", an accidentally invisible Buffy does this to a social worker (moving her coffee mug and whispering, "kill, kill...") who was probably about to have Dawn taken away. Kind of mean, since the social worker wasn't being unreasonable; she just happened to visit the Summers' house on a really bad day... which is probably every day around there...
  • "Dead Things" also played this for drama at one point, with Spike convincing the already severely depressive Buffy that she Came Back Wrong, and is thus inherently evil. Buffy ends up telling Tara (who was also gaslighted into thinking she was inherently evil for a long time) about this, and she convinced Buffy that it's false. Interestingly, this is a plot point Joss Whedon avoided answering. It's quite likely this was intentional.
• Used in retrospect in Burn Notice. The original plan was just to convince their target (an abusive and politically connected ex-husband) that people were trying to kill him, to get him to leave town. Unfortunately, his mobster brother wouldn't let him run, so they did some quick stepping to make it look like the whole thing was a series of paranoid hallucinations, presumably getting him committed in the end. Features an awesome performance by Michael as a Catholic priest. Conversation between Michael and Sam suggests this technique is a standard spy technique, particularly for targets with a history of substance abuse.
• Both TV adaptations of A Caribbean Mystery expand on the use of this trope from the novel. In the 1989 version the killer doesn't just try to fake his wife's suicide; he actively tries to convince her that she killed a woman (whom he actually killed himself, having mistaken the victim for the wife) in order to get her to kill herself out of guilt. The 2013 Marple version has the killer hiring a local woman to pretend to be murdered, and then "haunt" the wife by appearing to her as a ghost. Then, having served her purpose, he kills the woman for real.
• Cole does it to Paige in an episode of Charmed, along with having a demon possess her with insanity. He uses demon powers around her and erases the evidence, so she can't be sure she's seen anything.
  Cole: Paige? (he throws a fireball) What's the matter? Are you okay?
  Paige: How did you do that?
  Cole: Do what?
• Cleverman: Jerrod tries to make Charlotte thinks she's simply imagining things as a result of being hormonal while pregnant after she realizes her pregnancy's abnormal. He secretly gave their child Hairypeople DNA to experiment without Charlotte's knowledge or consent.
• In the episode "The Ian Cam" from the BBC series Clone, Victor gaslights Rose in order to convince her that she has Alzheimer's disease so that she will have a brain scan.
• In Cold Case, when the team is investigating an alleged 1962 suicide in the episode "Slipping", this was both played straight and subverted. The housekeeper intended to drive the victim to insanity to have her committed in order to get to her husband, but the husband killed his wife to hide his plagiarism and made it look like a suicide, having manipulated the housekeeper into helping him gaslight her and then taking advantage of her previous apparently insane behavior when she caught on to his scheme.
• Colonel March of Scotland Yard: In "Present Tense", Ernest, the husband of March's niece Emily, takes advantage of his supposed death in a plane crash to 'haunt' Emily and attempt to drive her to commit suicide.
• Community:
  • The rest of the study group all insist to Pierce that they celebrated his birthday, blaming the painkillers he's taking for why he doesn't remember. It turns out this particular example doesn't work; in a later episode, after Pierce has played all sorts of convoluted mind-games on the study group under the pretext that he's dying, they angrily demand to know why he did so. Pierce yells back that he's sick of them all treating him like some kind of joke, citing their pathetic attempt at this and expecting him to buy it as one of the examples. They look suitably shamed (although they also point out that Pierce's treatment of them in turn kind of justifies their treatment of him).
  • Dr. Heidi tries to do this and convince the study group that Greendale Community College isn't real and they were all inmates at "Greendale Asylum". They initially buy it, but swiftly realize this claim makes no sense, and as he tried it out of desperation with no time to set anything up they have copious physical evidence to prove him wrong.
    Annie: I'm literally carrying a Greendale backpack!
  • After the midterm dance’s bear-themed decorations ("Bear Down for Midterms!") are deemed to be in poor taste after a recent bear attack, the study group quickly change them into dogs and changes the motto to “Fat Dog For Midterms”. They then try to convince a very confused Annie that this phrase has always existed, criticize her for not knowing it, and even create a Wikipedia page for it. It works once they start to accuse her of being racist.
  • Parodied in another episode where Annie's idea of a devious prank is to move everything on the dean's desk except the stapler slightly to one side so that he'll think someone had moved his stapler slightly to the other side.
• One episode of Corner Gas had the entire cast, mostly Brent and Emma, do this in order to make Oscar think his memory was failing him in his old age. He even starts suspecting it, but they just laugh and tell him he's being ridiculous. At the end of the episode, Emma starts feeling guilty and makes Brent tell Oscar the truth. Oscar has forgotten everything and doesn't know what the hell Brent's talking about.
• Crazy Ex-Girlfriend:
  • Rebecca isn't trying to drive Josh crazy, but she uses every trick she can to convince him they should be together, sometimes straying into this. The most obvious attempt is when at the end of the first season they get together and she confesses she moved to West Covina for him and "our love story can finally begin" — then at the beginning of the second she realizes this creeps him out, feigns confusion, denies she ever said it, claims he's the one who did and pretends his fixation on her is weird until he apologizes and she graciously forgives him.
  • Josh later describes his behaviour towards Rebecca in early season 2 as gaslighting, back when he was insisting that they were just Friends with Benefits while she clearly wanted more (though YMMV on whether gaslighting is an accurate description of that situation.)
• Dark Desire:
  • Discussed by Alma and her psychiatrist, since she's unsure if all her suspicious about Darío are unsound or not. Her psychiatrist says based on what she describes he may be doing this to her.
  • Leonardo later gets convinced by Esteban that he murdered Brenda, but doesn't remember it (he's innocent).
• The Department S episode "The Ghost of Mary Burnham" has an unassuming economist being driven insane to prevent him from being appointed as head of the International Monetary Fund.
• In an episode of Diagnosis: Murder, a hypnotherapist framed one of his patients and convinced her she was a murderer by killing his wife himself, putting the patient in a trance and commanding her to come to his house and pick up the murder weapon (since it's impossible to hypnotise someone into committing murder) and making her wake up standing next to the body with the weapon in her hand.
• Doctor Who:
  • In "The Power of the Daleks", Lesterson manages to get gaslighted by a Dalek. The main Dalek in the story had been acting subservient to the humans ("I am your SERRRR-vant") and Lesterson had been trying to sell it to the other members of the colony as a miracle find that would help in the mines. After Lesterson works out that the Daleks are up to something after seeing their factory, his Dalek is constantly seen performing actions (such as laying cables) and insisting, when Lesterson asks him what he's doing, that he had ordered him to do it — "I. Am. Your. SERRRR-VANT." Lesterson soon becomes confused as to whether he actually did witness the Dalek factory, and the other colonists all decide that he's insane, refusing to take anything he says seriously.
  • In "The Android Invasion", it's revealed Styggron convinced Crayford that he only has one eye. Near the end of the story, the Doctor tells Crayford to take his eyepatch off, and he discovers the eye under there.
  • In "Mindwarp", the Valeyard takes advantage of the Doctor's memory wipe to manipulate him into believing that the edited Matrix footage being used in his trial is a true account of his recent adventure on Thoros Beta, and that he is becoming too mentally unreliable to defend himself. The Doctor, however, adamantly resists it, and realizes by the end of the story that his trial is being conducted with sinister intentions.
  • "Journey to the Centre of the TARDIS" features a scrap crew where one member is convinced he is a robot. He isn't — his brothers gaslighted him into thinking he was to psychologically torture him out of pure boredom.
• In an episode of The Drew Carey Show, Oswald and Lewis play pranks like this on Drew. They change the settings on his scale so he thinks he's lost a bunch of weight, they then giddily explain to someone that they plan on exchanging his bed for a smaller one while he sleeps so he'll think he's gotten huge.
• Dynasty (2017) uses this to put Steven Carrington on a bus to hell while providing an Establishing Character Moment for his replacement: Having already departed Atlanta to do charitable work in the field after discovering his true parentage,^note his biological father is Carrington majordomo Joseph Anders, as a result of an affair with Alexis Carrington Steven later meets up with his sister Fallon and ex-husband Sam in Paris. There, he reveals his new companion, an enigmatic man named "George", has manipulated him into a number of Out of Character activities, like trying drugs and aimlessly spending money on frivolities. When "George" fails to show up to a number of scheduled meet-ups, Fallon and Sam begin to suspect that "George" is a figment of Steven's deteriorating mental state. This is seemingly bolstered by other inconsistencies with Steven's accounts of his time in Paris, like finding money and a passport he claimed were stolen off of him. Steven is eventually confronted by Fallon and Sam when they think he's on the brink of suicide and convince him to commit himself to an insane asylum in the city. Just after Fallon and Sam leave, however, "George" enters and confronts a heavily-sedated Steven, revealing his true identity and intentions - he's actually Adam, the long-lost oldest Carrington sibling, and set Steven up to be locked away, under improper treatment for a nonexistent mental illness, as the first step to claiming his "rightful" place as Carrington heir.
• Extant: Come episode five What On Earth is Wrong? the ISEA have attempted this to make sure everybody else thinks she's crazy. Molly lets them think they've convinced her as well in order to dig deeper.
• Farscape: "Won't Get Fooled Again", where Crichton recognizes it beforehand. "Somebody is gaslighting me!" This was actually the second or third time it had been done to him (depending on if you count Maldis who made it completely blatant), although the first where driving him nuts was the actual intent.
• Done in an episode of Australian drama series The Flying Doctors. For an extra twist, a medicine with the known side effect of making people dizzy and confused is mixed into the victim's food, in addition to basic gaslighting.
• Namechecked by Roz in an episode of Frasier where he seems to be getting more forgetful and she pranks him into thinking he'd made an appointment with his hairdresser.
• Inverted in an episode of Full House. After accidentally damaging the wall in Danny's room, the girls move everything over by about 3 inches to hide the damage and maintain the symmetry of the room. This allows us to see how set in his ways Danny is when he starts dropping things on the floor because he had memorized exactly where everything had been.
• F/X: The Series also used this trope albeit sparingly — the protagonist being the head of a special effects studio who's often roped in by the local law enforcement and detectives to get a confession out of a suspect.
• Felicia Jones and Mac Scorpio pull this on General Hospital's Ryan Chamberlain, trying to get him to confess to being a Serial Killer—they break into his apartment and spray paint it with messages from his victims—"WHY?!", "You will pay", etc.
• Gotham Knights (2023): Jane Doe accuses Harvey Dent of doing this to her, saying he would have sex with her secretly but then claim they had no relationship in public, before finally having her locked in Arkham as a supposedly dangerous, deluded stalker. After he hears this, Harvey realizes that it was his alternate personality who had been with her. Doing things such as leaving a cow's heart as a "gift" with his secretary probably didn't help her case however.
• The Handmaid's Tale: Janine may be delusional, but her delusions were undoubtedly fed by Warren. In a moment of clarity, she publicly calls him out on it.
  Janine: You said we would be a family!
  Warren: She's not well.
  Janine: I was well enough to suck your cock! I did every fucked-up thing you wanted. All the freaky shit she'd never do, because you promised me we would run off and we would be a family!
• Hannibal uses this several times, with the title character employing it to keep his crimes hidden.
  • In "Entrée", Dr. Frederick Chilton is accused of having accidentally done this to one of his psychiatric patients, former surgeon Dr. Abel Gideon who was institutionalized after killing his relatives. Chilton planted the idea in Gideon's head that he is actually the Chesapeake Ripper, a serial killer whose murders stopped around the time Gideon was locked up. It's so effective that even when Gideon discovers he's been gaslit, he still isn't entirely sure he's not the Ripper. When Alana Bloom calls Chilton out on this it's implied that he realized what was going on but decided to play along to keep the renown from being the psychiatrist to someone as famous as The Ripper.
  • Also throughout season 1 Hannibal turns out to have been doing this to Will Graham, with his ultimate goal being to convince Will he's a serial killer and mold him into an apprentice. He pulled this off with a combination of hypnosis and taking advantage of Will's undiscovered encephalitis.
  • Happens again in Season 2 when Miriam Lass turns out to be alive, if missing an arm. Years of captivity, hypnosis, and drugging by Hannibal means she's primed to be in a position to think that Chilton was the Chesapeake Ripper.
• In Happy Endings, the episode "The Kerkovich Way" reveals the eponymous way involves lying to someone, flooding them with specific details until they question their own perception of reality. Alex protests and says it's wrong, while Jane (who does it so often to her husband he's one MRI away from a free MRI) uses it very often, to crazy extremes in this episode.
• In Hercules: The Legendary Journeys, Dahak did this to Nebula by using Iolaus' body to appear in front of her as "hallucinations". Nebula and her courtier Agenor only realize the truth when Hercules engages "Iolaus" in a physical fight. Agenor apologizes to Nebula for believing she was crazy. Given the circumstances, Nebula admits that she kind of wishes she was.
• Higher Ground: There's a chilling, realistic example when Scott tells his stepmom he'll tell his dad she raped him. She calmly replies that his dad will never believe it. Then later she tells him that his dad wouldn't forgive it either, because he'd think they'd had a consensual affair. Unfortunately, she's right that his dad won't believe. He thinks Scott is just making something up from dislike of his stepmom.
• Brody does this to Carrie to some extent in season one of Homeland. She's completely right about him, but he manages to convince her that it's all in her head. It helps that she really is bipolar. It also helps that he does nothing overtly that would make him appear guilty, even backing down completely during his chance to use a suicide vest. Though he only did this after Carrie convinced his daughter to call him.
• After Mac and Dennis move to the suburbs in It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, the low-battery warning chirp/beep of their new house's smoke detector goes off throughout the day, but only Mac can hear it. A heated argument later reveals Dennis was just messing with Mac.
  Dennis: Newsflash, asshole! I've been hearing it the entire goddamn time!
  Mac: Then why wouldn't you say something?!
  Dennis: BECAUSE I HAAAATE YOU!!!
• Jessica Jones (2015) shows gaslighting extensively (and very realistically, despite the setting — real-world victims of the technique have commented on how truthfully gaslighting is depicted by the show). This is not surprising, for a show that uses a villain with mind-controlling powers as an explicit metaphor for domestic abuse. At various times, first season villain (and Jessica's former abuser) Kilgrave attempts to confuse and distort Jessica's reality not with his actual mind-control powers, but simply by retelling the story of their relationship from a delusional perspective, that he insists on in the face of Jessica's own memories. Similarly, we see other characters such as Trish deal with this tactic from her mother. Interestingly, Jessica Jones doesn't simply demonstrate realistic gaslighting and its psychological effects alone but shows its characters combating the technique by re-asserting their own stories. A recurring theme has Jessica reciting the names of streets she knew from the neighbourhood she once lived in, part of a psychological technique sometimes used by victims of abuse to have something concrete to hold onto that is outside of the warped reality insisted on by their Kilgrave.
• Crops up in Jonathan Creek in "The Judas Tree". Jonathan also mentions Gaslight at one point during the episode.
• Knots Landing: In Season Nine, Jill tries to convince Valene that she is going insane. The first part of her plan involves hiring the forger Mrs. Bailey to write Valene letters in Ben's handwriting in order to convince her that Ben is returning home after almost a year in South America without a word from him. This essentially serves as a prelude to the gaslighting to make Valene more susceptible to it. Jill then obtains tape recordings of Ben's voice from his time as a TV journalist at PWC and edits them to form messages to Valene which she leaves on her answering machine. The first of them has Ben say that he is returning home soon. Valene excitedly tells Gary, Karen, and Mack the good news but she is unable to locate the tape with the message on it so they all begin to suspect that it may have been just her imagination. What she doesn't realise is that Jill broke into her house and stole the tape to discredit her and make her doubt herself.
• The talk show, Karamo, recieved accusations of gaslighting when they interviewed Pink Sauce Lady ^Note Whose sauce was poorly packaged and not refridgerated during delivery, meaning her customers got bottles of sauce riddled with bacteria and botulism (which can cause paralysis). After hearing her side of story, Karamo then brought on one of her critics (who had completely valid points), and spent the entire interview scolding her, letting Pink Sauce Lady openly insult her, and forcing her to admit that she was in the wrong for giving the sauce a bad review. And even worse, the lab report on what was actually in the sauce never got shown during the show, even though it was the only reason the critic came on the show in the first place, which Karamo even teased before the interview. Many viewers who were familiar with the situation called out Karamo for blatantly gaslighting somone on Live TV. Not long after, the video was removed without an explanation or apology, but the damage was already done.
• In Law & Order: Special Victims Unit:
  • Amaro's father, mother, and sister all engage in this regarding the abuse his father put him and his mother through.
  • The victim of the week in "Swimming With The Sharks" has this done to her by three of her employees as part of a plan to make her lose her company.
• Occasionally used on Leverage:
  • "The Order-23 Job" has the team use a faked outbreak to freak out a germophobic Corrupt Corporate Executive who's about to go away to Club Fed. They get him to escape the custody of the Federal Marshals in order to lead him to his hidden stolen money.
  • "The Three Days of the Hunter Job" has the team target a tabloid TV reporter and make her think she's stumbled upon a conspiracy theory involving terrorists and when that isn't enough, ups the ante without much effort. The episode gets extra points when the team convinces the reporter that there's a chemical in the water supply, and give her pills to counteract it — pills that turn out to be anti-psychotic meds. Guess what happens when she interrupts a broadcast for "breaking news" and her producers tackle her...
  • "The Morning After Job" may take the prize. The team convinced a protected federal witness that he had killed his one-night stand, played by Parker, to convince him to give them evidence against Big Bad Moreau. The plan goes awry, so they end up bringing Parker into the courtroom when he's about to give his testimony and escape all consequences for his actions. Needless to say, he flips out and ends up being tazed after leaping off the stand screaming "WHO ARE YOU WORKING FOR?" at Parker and a bewildered FBI agent (who believed that Parker was also FBI).
• Liar (2017): Andrew expertly twists what Laura says, doing all he can to get her thinking she just was confused, and he didn't rape her.
• Namechecked in the Made in Canada episode "Alan's Brother", in which the executives at Pyramid Productions do this to erstwhile CEO Alan's older brother (and legal owner of Pyramid) Frank after he is released from a mental hospital, takes over as CEO and proves even more inept than Alan. They start by replacing the coffee mug on his desk with other mugs while he is out of the room and then accusing him of stealing them while placing his mug in strange but highly visible places. This escalates to putting all of the office's coffee mugs in his desk drawer, at which point production adviser Veronica dresses as Frank's abusive mother to confront him over the "theft". He proceeds to re-commit himself and hands the reins of Pyramid back to Alan.
• Malcolm in the Middle:
  • Used by Dewey to punish Lois for not getting him an ingredient he needs for a science experiment.
  • He also did this to Hal for refusing to buy him a piano. Mostly by making things go missing. Then it was revealed that the many things he stole throughout the episode were for an organ he was constructing in the garage.
  • Hal did this to Lois once. Lois gets into a car accident which appears to be her fault, but which she insists is not, even when shown a video that seemingly proves her guilt. When Hal finds a video shot from another angle that proves she was right all along, he decides to never let her see it. He was so desperate to hear her admit that she was wrong about something that he didn't care that she was actually right.
  • Hal does it again when Lois is pregnant with Jamie, secretly tampering with her diet to make her gain weight because he loves how big she's getting. He's shown tricking her into eating a birthday cake he claims was sugar-free, covertly injects melted butter into her rice cakes with a syringe, and coats her celery in bacon grease. Lois has absolutely no idea he's doing it and thinks her hormones are messing with her senses, up until Dewey exposes Hal pouring syrup into her tea behind her back.
• M*A*S*H:
  • In the episode "The Ringbanger", Leslie Nielsen plays a visiting colonel with an astonishingly high casualty rate, and the doctors decide to give him "a karate chop to his mental well-being" to get him a Section 8 discharge and prevent him reassuring his command. They mess with him by repeatedly moving the location of his tent (and the camp loudspeaker next to it), giving him a glass of milk that they claim he'd been insistent about getting all morning, and convincing him that Major Burns is really a homosexual crossdresser lusting after him.
  • In "The Winchester Tapes", B.J. switches Charles's uniforms with those of heavier/thinner men to make him think he's losing/gaining weight. At one point Hawkeye asks B.J. what's next. The answer: "He gets taller."
  • The series finale, "Goodbye, Farewell and Amen", sees Hawkeye committed to a psychiatric ward after having suffered a mental breakdown. When B.J. comes to visit him, Hawkeye starts ranting and sharing his paranoid suspicions that Sidney Freedman and the rest of the hospital staff are doing this to him, even referencing the Gaslight movie.
• In an episode of Medium, a man tries to get his wife committed to an insane asylum by drugging her candy with hallucinogens. It gets out of control when the priest accidentally takes some, too, and the man who was drugging his wife hits him on the head, causing him to fall down the stairs (he feared that the priest would be suspicious once he became lucid again).
• Midsomer Murders:
  • Done in the episode "Beyond the Grave" where a woman's brother-in-law and her therapist conspire to make her think she's going insane, seeing her dead husband's ghost.
  • One of the mysteries in "Sauce for the Goose". The Plummer matriarch keeps seeing a stuffed figure hanged from a tree near her house as someone tries to trigger her mental breakdown.
  • In "The Great and the Good", Howard Richardson uses Connie's boots to plant Footprints of Muck on her doorstep as part of a scheme to convince her that she might be the killer. Circumstances intervene to make the bootprints less effective than they might have been, but seeds of doubt are planted in her mind.
  • A later episode has a woman made to believe she's committed several murders via voices being transmitted while she's sleeping and hearing creaking stairs. It turns out the murders were committed by a man who's installed several transmitters in her house to get her to blame herself. Jones himself listens to the sounds from the bedroom while fully conscious and claims he'd go for his bat.
• Mission: Impossible uses this as one of the many ways to frighten their con into submission, often with the help of high-tech gadgetry and Latex Perfection.
• Monk:
  • Inverted only to be played straight in "Mr. Monk Goes to the Asylum", where Dr. Lancaster dresses as Santa Claus to gain entry to a chimney in a mental institution to retrieve the gun he used a few years ago to shoot and kill a rival doctor at the institution because he knows the patient in the room overlooking his route is obsessed with Santa Claus and won't be believed. Unfortunately, Dr. Lancaster's plan backfired when he was forced to abandon the search because one of the patients was throwing a fit, and he apparently didn't anticipate that the patient in question would actually photograph him or that Monk would start investigating. As an emergency fix, he makes things seem as though Monk and the patient in question were becoming insane (or in the case of the patient, more insane than he already was), such as stealing the camera as well as rags from his Santa suit that Monk discovered, stealing a fellow inmate's necklace and somehow planting it on Monk to make it seem as though he stole it, and replacing pictures he drew with more disturbing pictures.
  • This seems to be happening to Sharona in "Mr Monk and the Girl Who Cried Wolf", where she seemingly hallucinates the ghost of a dead man and start losing and forgetting things. The culprit turns out to be her writing professor, who was conspiring with her lover to steal a murder method from Sharona's mystery story in order to kill the professor's husband. In order to cover their tracks, they needed to discredit Sharona as the only person who would instantly recognise the crime.
  • In "Mr. Monk Goes to the Dentist", there is an episode-length use of this trope: Randy is undergoing a dental operation at Dr. Bloom's to remove an infected tooth. During the operation, a bald man barges in and furiously demands that Dr. Bloom tell him what he's done with Barry Bonds, who is worth $13 million. A fight breaks out, with Dr. Bloom and his assistant Terri ultimately killing the intruder. When Randy comes around after his operation is over, he looks around and sees no signs that a fight ever happened, because Dr. Bloom and Terri had dumped the body in the woods and also replaced broken equipment. Everyone, Stottlemeyer included, dismisses Randy's claim as an effect of being under anasthetics at the time. When the victim's body does turn up, Randy identifies him as the man Dr. Bloom killed but is laughed at by the other cops and quits in anger (Stottlemeyer theorizes to Randy that according to him, the intruder confronted Dr. Bloom because he thought Dr. Bloom kidnapped Barry Bonds and they were arguing about the ransom money). Randy only realizes that he wasn't hallucinating when he notices an article about the armored car robbery that the dead man, Denny Jardeen, had been involved in: in that robbery, armed men with pistols and rifles had hijacked an armored car, unloaded it at a warehouse, shot and killed both guards, and made off with $13 million in bearer bonds. Randy realizes that one of the guards punched Jardeen in the face before he was shot, Jardeen had gone to Dr. Bloom's to get a broken tooth fixed, and divulged the location of the bonds to him and Terri while under anesthesia. The good doctors went to his house, found the money in a toolshed, but instead of turning the money in to the police, they kept it. When Jardeen figured out what happened to the bonds, he confronted Bloom about it, forcing Bloom and Terri to kill him. Randy misinterpreted "bearer" as "Barry", explaining the Barry Bonds discrepancy.
  • Another case happens to Monk in "Mr. Monk Is Up All Night": Suffering from insomnia, Monk is wandering through the streets, and happens to pass by a diner kitchen where he hears an argument going on. He peeks through a window and sees a drug deal going bad, with the dealer and customer debating if a third man at the deal, an Asian, is actually a cop or not. Suddenly, the Asian pulls a badge and gun and declares the other two men under arrest. Monk looks away as the drug dealer attacks the undercover cop, only to hear a gunshot. He looks and sees the drug dealer has shot and killed the cop (and blood has splattered everywhere). The dealer hustles the customer into a waiting car that speeds away. But when the police arrive, however, the kitchen (which was destroyed in the fight) is spotless and immaculate, and there is no evidence that a murder happened, not even a body to prove a thing, and no cops have been reported missing. Monk later finds the supposed "undercover cop" at a train station, but he denies ever having been to the diner. He also locates the customer, a coin dealer, who denies ever having been there. The apparent murder was an elaborate con by the Asian and "drug dealer" to steal the coin dealer's merchandise, tricking him into thinking he had witnessed a murder and was paying them hush money. The reason why the kitchen was spotless is that a waitress at the restaurant helped the Asian clean up the kitchen before the cops arrived.
  • In "Mr. Monk Goes on Vacation", Sharona's son Benjy is the one who witnesses a murder, and only Monk believes him. The hotel manager in particular chalks it up to the boy's imagination. Eventually, when Monk figures out the true culprits, they made sure that they clean up all the evidence to continue making it look like Monk is a loon and Benjy is crying wolf.
  • "Mr. Monk Gets Drunk", both the guests at a hotel and the owner and staff find one fellow patron dead from a heart attack, and that he has a ton of money in his room. They intend to share it among themselves. The problem is that Monk had a chat with the dead patron the night before, so they conspired to make it look like the guy was someone Monk just made up. The charade includes reshooting a group photo, since an initial photo taken while Monk was present included the victim, and sabotaging the guy's car and make it look like it's been on the property for years. Monk almost managed to get fooled, until a hitman looking for the dead guy arrives, with the picture of his quarry.
• Motherland: Fort Salem: Anacostia and Izadora both know Scylla is alive and imprisoned at Fort Salem, but both of them insist to Raelle that Scylla is dead. It gets worse when Anacostia uses Raelle to break Scylla during interrogation but uses a sleeping spell on Raelle to make Raelle think it was all a dream.
• A really disturbing example of this was used in Murder in Mind. A middle-aged doctor 'confesses' how he helped his wife commit suicide after she developed a degenerative brain disorder. What he doesn't tell is that he wanted her out of the way and she was perfectly healthy — he created her problems with a poisonous metalloid combined with this trope.
• Murder, She Wrote: In "Angel of Death", a playwright friend of Jessica's is being gaslighted to convince him that he is being haunted by the ghost of his dead wife. (Especially appropriate as Angela Lansbury was in the 1944 film version of Gaslight.)
• Parodied in an episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000 when Pearl makes the bots hallucinate. While it fails to have any effect on Tom Servo (who sees everyone as an Eldritch Abomination, just like normal), Crow's hallucinations bring him to the brink of despair when he sees that Mike's Snickers bar is suddenly a Milky Way.
• The Victim of the Week in an early episode of NCIS was subjected to this treatment via a radio hidden in her house's ventilation to make her hear voices.
• Neighbours:
  • Elle Robinson did this to Max Hoyland in revenge for his role in her brother's death (a case of mistaken identity, due to said brother having an evil triplet. This was his exit storyline, as his marriage never recovered even after regaining his sanity.
  • Years before that, Michael Martin gaslighted his stepmother Julie Martin; he always blamed her for breaking up his mum and dad's marriage, driving his mum to alcoholism and later death in a car crash. Michael proceeded to gaslight Julie by moving objects around the home (or hiding them), pretending he hadn't talked to her about things (or alternately, pretending to have talked to her when he hadn't), and altering her dosage of tranquilisers. By the end, he had her convinced she was insane, including leaving the house and running around the back to make it appear that there was more than one of him, and was only caught out because he got too cocky.
  • Used and namechecked in a 2015 story arc which again involved a (former) Hoyland and a Robinson. When Stephanie Scully returned after two years in a mental hospital, she quickly befriended Paul's daughter Amy and grandson Jimmy. Paul, concerned for Jimmy's safety (and possibly still carrying a grudge over Steph's involvement in the death of Ringo Brown), attempted to make her doubt her sanity again and force her to return to the hospital, using information he learned from Steph's psychiatric nurse/ex-girlfriend Belinda. However, he was soon exposed for it after blackmailing Aaron into helping him, and Stephanie managed to trick him into a confession by pretending that it had worked.
• The Office (US):
  • About half the pranks Jim plays on Dwight fall under this category. Of note is the time he and Pam got an actor friend to make Dwight think Jim had retroactively turned Asian-American.
  • Another time, Dwight is convinced that Jim and Pam are blinking in Morse Code in order to talk about him behind his back. When he calls them out on this, Jim responds by pointing out that they are working parents of a newborn baby and asking if Dwight honestly thought they would pay money to hire a babysitter so they could learn an outdated skill just to torment Dwight.
    Jim: (cut) Yep! That's exactly what we did.
• The Opposition with Jordan Klepper frequently uses an actual gaslight in a Visual Pun as part of a Running Gag.
• The Outer Limits (1995):
  • In "Awakening", Beth Carter suffers from alexithymia which prevents her from feeling emotions. However, she receives a revolutionary brain implant developed by Dr. Steven Molstad which allows her to access the full range of emotions for the first time. Beth moves in with Molstad's colleague Joan Garrison so she can slowly adjust to the outside world and learn how to process her emotions in the normal way. While staying in Joan's apartment, she begins to have strange experiences such as Hearing Voices, seeing Joan's cat Mulligan butchered (only for him to turn up alive and well later on), and being abducted and experimented upon by aliens. Dr. Molstad tells Beth that it may be necessary to remove the implant but she steadfastly refuses. It turns out that Joan secretly works for a rival company that is developing a brain implant similar to Molstad's and that she and her boyfriend Kevin Flynn (who pretended to be attracted to Beth) were attempting to drive Beth insane in the hope of discrediting Molstad's implant. They were assisted in their plan by Mike and Dolly Kellerman, two other residents of Joan's apartment building.
  • In "Nightmare", the crew of the United World Forces spaceship Archipelago believe that they have been captured by the Ebonites and are psychologically tortured but it turns out to be an elaborate simulation to gauge their reactions.
  • In "What Will The Neighbors Think?" Ned uses a tape of voices to gaslight Mona into thinking she's really still hearing them after they went away. This makes her so distraught she kills herself.
  • In "Mindreacher", Judith Wilder has been Hearing Voices for quite some time. It is ruining her life to the point that she is not going to school and she has distanced herself from her friends since she does not want any of them to witness one of her attacks. It turns out that Judith's nanny Alice has been secretly giving her a drug for the treatment of Parkinson's disease, formerly used by Judith's late mother, to deliberately induce auditory hallucinations. Alice is madly in love with Judith's father Chancellor Duncan Wilder and feared that he would no longer need her services as Judith was getting older.
• The Poirot adaptation of Third Girl has this as part of the solution but takes it a step further than the original novel. Instead of feeding Norma drugs to make her believe she is going crazy, the murderers go for classics like planting a knife in her room and then removing it after the murder. They also deliberately kill the victim similarly to how Norma’s mother committed suicide, and even attempt to deliberately trigger painful memories of that incident in seemingly innocent conversations.
• Happens to Caroline in the penultimate episode of Poldark, with two separate yet escalating incidents—first, her horse is spooked with her on it, and later, her dog is poisoned, albeit not fatally.
• The Prisoner (1967):
  • Number Six does this to a particularly nasty Number Two in "Hammer Into Anvil". He's long since learned that his fellow citizens will immediately tattle on every action of his. But if he does random things for no reason, the other Villagers have nothing to report. But Two can't accept that. They must all be in cahoots with Six!
  • Variations on the technique are used against Number Six in several episodes, most notably in "The Schizoid Man", where Number Six is brainwashed to believe that he's a Village agent brought in to impersonate the "real" Number Six (who actually is a Village agent impersonating him) in order to break him.
• In Psychoville we have a character do this to themselves, creating a false borderline schizophrenic hallucination in order to remain committed, only to eventually go genuinely insane.
• In the Quantum Leap episode "A Portrait for Troian", Sam jumps into the body of a parapsychologist working with a young widow who insists the ghost of her late husband is haunting. It turns out to be a plot by her brother to gaslight her.
• In the Red Dwarf episode "Quarantine", Rimmer contracts a holovirus which turns him Ax-Crazy, after the others are trapped in a quarantine cell. They attempt to humour his bizarre behaviour, which backfires.
  RIMMER: I can’t let you out.
  LISTER: Why not?
  RIMMER: Because the King of the Potato People won’t let me. I begged him. I got down on my knees and wept. He wants to keep you here. Keep you here for ten years.
  CAT: Could we see him?
  RIMMER: See who?
  CAT: The King.
  RIMMER: Do you have a magic carpet?
  LISTER: Yeah, a little three-seater.
  RIMMER: So, let me get this straight. You want to fly on a magic carpet to see the King of the Potato People and plead with him for your freedom, and you’re telling me you are completely sane?!
• On The Red Green Show, one segment of the Possum Lodge Word Game (a Password-esque game where Red tries to get a Lodge member to guess a certain word by giving hints) features Red trying to get Dalton to say "Paranoid".
  Red: You have two slippers. That makes a...
  Dalton: Pair.
  Red: If someone bugs you, you get...
  Dalton: Annoyed.
  Red: Put 'em together! Put 'em together!
  Dalton: Are you saying that someone is stealing my slippers to annoy me? Y'know, it's probably my neighbour. He's trying to get me. He thinks I sneak into his house at night and rearrange his furniture.
  Red: Okay, and he thinks that because he's...
  Dalton: Caught me doing it!
• Used on Remington Steele as Steele and Laurel pull a scheme to force a murderer to confess. Keeping to a running theme of the series, Steele openly cites the movie as the inspiration.
• Invoked by name in one episode of Reno 911!. Junior is gaslighting Trudy, and that's how he discovers her video will. The others give him suggestions.
• On Resident Alien, the Hugh Mann alien Harry Vanderspeigle killed the human Harry Vanderspeigle and later hid the body in his freezer. In the penultimate episode of the first season, this is discovered by D'Arcy Bloom. However, by the time she reports it to the police, the alien has returned home and hid the body. Nobody believes her about having there having been a dead body in the freezer, and she accuses the town Sheriff, Mike Thompson, and Deputy Liv Baker of gaslighting her.
• Scrubs:
  • The Janitor convinces Kelso that he's suffering memory loss like this. Largely by yanking Ted around with a crane, but whatever works for comedy. Kelso does figure it out though and gets back at the Janitor. And then done to the Janitor in the last season, where they actually convince him all the weird stuff he did (building a giant sandcastle in the parking lot, etc.) was just in his mind. He believes it. Or does he?
  • J.D. also mentions that he's attempting to do this to Turk when he asks Melody to keep a tiny bottle of ketchup so that he can replace everything in his apartment with tiny versions and convince Turk that he's grown extraordinarily tall.
  • In the episode "My Buddy's Booty", the Janitor reveals to Dr Cox that he stole the keys to J.D.'s apartment, so he can go in, switch off his alarm, and move stuff around. He then pushes it beyond deniability by taking J.D.'s bed to the hospital while he's asleep and leaving it in front of an ambulance.
• On Sisters, Georgie's therapist plants the idea in her head that she's a victim of sexual abuse, as it's frequently a cause of the depression and anxiety that she's been suffering. That very night, she has a flashback of her father touching her inappropriately. Within weeks, she's convinced that her father repeatedly molested her, and estranged from her family—her mother for supposedly turning a blind eye and failing to protect her, her sisters for being in denial about being abused themselves, and her husband for not believing her, along with experiencing a newfound Paralyzing Fear of Sexuality. Only months later, watching one of her sisters, a doctor, examine her ill son, does she realize that what she remembered was her father examining her (he was a doctor too). She's horrified to realize that all of her feelings were completely unjustified and that everything was a ploy by her therapist to seduce her.
• Star Trek: The Next Generation:
  • In "Remember Me", Beverly Crusher finds herself the victim of gaslighting by a Negative Space Wedgie which alters reality so that everyone she had known begins to vanish, with only her aware of the disappearances. Eventually, her medical team vanishes. Then her son. The last to vanish is Captain Picard, by which point Beverly was being told that she and Picard were the only crewmembers on the Enterprise.
  • Also happens to Riker in "Frame of Mind", as his alien captors try to brainwash him by making him think he's in a Cuckoo Nest.
  • Famously, in "Chain of Command": "There are four lights!". The Cardassians psychologically torture a captured Picard by showing him a set of four lights and asking him how many there are, punishing him each time he says four and stating that there are actually five. Despite his defiant proclamation after being released, Picard admits that, towards the end, he really started to think that there were five lights.
• Dax (with Quark's help, evidently) moved Odo's furniture while he was regenerating "four times in the past year" preceding the fourth-season Star Trek: Deep Space Nine episode "Homefront". Of course, she's only moving his stuff two or three centimeters each time, but it still drives him crazy enough to confront Quark about it.
• Strangers From Hell: Done repeatedly to Jong-woo, with the result that he eventually goes insane.
  • Eden's other residents constantly cross his boundaries. When he complains to Ms. Eom she tells him it's just a misunderstanding.
  • Despite Jong-woo's boss and his jealous coworker's rude indirect (and direct) jabs at his living situation and personality in general, they tell Jong-woo he's overreacting when he justifiably gets mad.
  • No one takes Jong-woo seriously when he says there's something strange happening in Eden Studio. They all say he's imagining it, he's exaggerating, there's nothing wrong...
• Stranger Things:
  • After breaking into the Hawkins Laboratory and seeing the portal to the Upside Down, Chief Hopper is drugged by agents of the conspiracy and deposited back home, with loads of pill bottles scattered around him to make him think upon regaining consciousness that he's simply had a drug bender and hallucinated the entire thing. He doesn't buy it, and instead tears his house apart until he discovers the bug that he's convinced they would have planted in his house to further monitor him.
  • Joyce is a victim of a not-quite-intentional version of this trope when her estranged husband Lonnie returns home for the funeral of their son Will. Joyce is convinced that her son is still alive and has even witnessed him trapped in another dimension, but after only a few hours Lonnie has her doubting her own sanity and starting to believe that she's actually just having a psychotic breakdown out of stress, exhaustion, and grief. She's not, and she eventually snaps out of it and realises she's not insane at all, but it turns out Lonnie actually was planning to gaslight her into suing the company everyone believes is responsible for their son's death so he can collect a massive cash payout and then abandon her again. He just genuinely had no idea that there actually were the kind of sanity-doubting unusual things going on at the same time. As Lonnie is an abusive deadbeat, it's implied that Joyce has fallen victim to these kinds of manipulations before.
  • In a more egregious example, Hawkins Lab has faked Will's death but Joyce knows he's still alive, and they attempt to use this trope on her.
  • The government attempt to convince Terry Ives that her daughter was stillborn.
• Superstore: In "Easter", Dina hunts down a suspicious man in an Easter Bunny costume, who turns out to be Jerry paying Sandra a visit. To protect him from Dina's wrath, Sandra claims that she doesn't see any Easter Bunny in an attempt to make Dina question her own sanity.
• An episode of T. and T. had a spoiled brother and sister do it to their (grand?)mother so she can't disinherit them and give everything to her parrot. To complicate matters, the butler is trying to murder her and the parrot.
• The Twilight Zone (1959):
  • Discussed in "Person or Persons Unknown". David Gurney believes that someone is attempting to drive him crazy by buying off everyone who knows him, including his wife Wilma, his best friend Pete, and his own mother, so they will pretend not to know him.
  • Again discussed in "What's in the Box". Joe Britt accuses his wife Phyllis and the TV repairman of plotting to drive him crazy after his recently fixed TV shows him incriminating scenes from his life.
• In the Ultraseven episode "the Green Terror", Ultra Garrison astronaut Captain Ishiguro was replaced by a plant alien who terrorized Earthlings before capturing them and replacing them with plant aliens disguised as humans. Ishiguro's impostor would become moody and secretive before transforming, go out on rampages, and later pretend to the wife and housekeeper that nothing was going on, even after they witnessed his true form a few times. It all culminated with "the couple" going on a vacation by train and his transformation into a kaijuu before her own eyes.
• A superpower-based example in The Umbrella Academy: Reginald forces Allison to Rumor Vanya into believing that she is ordinary, while Reginald feeds Vanya pills to suppress her powers. "I heard a rumor you think you're just ordinary." Allison's powers in general: she can literally speak whatever she wants into existence. If she tells you something's true while using her powers, you will believe her.
• In Vengeance Unlimited, Mr. Chapel uses a police officer's ID and his own computer savvy to drive his mark crazy. It's almost undone by his mark's biggest fan, a computer genius herself... Until he gets the mark to confess within her earshot.
  • That show loved this trope. There's another point in that episode where he pays off an entire restaurant to use Monopoly money instead of cash, much to the horrified confusion of the victim. Then, to drive the nail home, he has them switch back to real money when the victim is in the bathroom, then back again when he goes to pick up the check. It works beautifully.
• Tori is on the receiving end of this in Victorious by a mysterious new student named Ponnie. Ponnie at first seems friendly but always disappears whenever other people are around. She also vandalizes Tori's locker but fixes it before Tori can show it to her friends. This causes everyone to assume Tori has had a mental breakdown and is seeing things.
• Walker, Texas Ranger: In "Mind Games", after a pair of adulterers kill the wife's husband (whose mother happens to be C.D.'s friend), Make It Look Like an Accident, and inherit half of the trust, they decide to get the mother's half this way. Their tactics involve spiking her tea with small amounts of ecstasy, moving her things around when she isn't looking, and having someone dressed as her dead son ride down on a boat, calling to her.
• In the White Collar episode "Vital Signs", Neal comes up with a plan to do this to a crooked doctor. They convince him that his kidney failed while he was on a flight to India looking for an illegal transplant, that he's currently in India hooked up to a dialysis machine, and that Neal (posing as a doctor) can get him the transplant he needs if he gives up the number of the account where he keeps his ill-gotten money.

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