Gold Digger / Live-Action TV

• Soap operas like to subvert this whenever an Interclass Romance comes up — the wealthy person's parents are convinced that the poor person is this and nothing can convince them otherwise. However, this rarely turns out to be true.
• Cerie of 30 Rock says her goal in life is to "marry rich and then design handbags." She has since gotten married to a guy we never meet, but who is implied to be wealthy.
• Angel: Cordelia, though it is thwarted by Doyle's gallantry, which starts making her dating pool look rather pathetic. It isn't helped by her date (a stock broker), who cannonballs into his Beamer and races off at first sight of a vamp without the slightest hesitation in leaving Cordie behind to be eaten.
  Cordelia: All I could think about was: if this wimp ever saw a monster he'd probably throw a shoe at it and run like a weasel! Turns out the shoe part was giving him too much credit.

  She also contemplates marrying incredibly rich and lonely geek David Nabbit, but accepts that even she has limits.

• The Brazilian telenovela Anjo mau, in all of its versions (the original Brazilian soap and its remake, an iconic Chilean remake in The '80s, and a modern Mexican version), discusses and presents this trope both in the main plot and in other minor stories:
  • Berenice aka Nice, the Anti Heroine, is one. As the wholesome-looking babysitter for a very wealthy Big, Screwed-Up Family and the eldest daughter of their Old Retainer chaffeur, the beautiful and greedy Nice plans from the beginning to marry either Roberto or Ricardo, the two young and handsome uncles of the baby boy she takes care of, so she can get out of poverty. In the original Brazilian version and the classic Chilean remake, she anviliciously falls victim to Death by Childbirth; in the Brazilian remake, she survives.
  • The father of the baby boy Nice babysits is accused of being one, especially when it seems like he's cheating on his wife, who already is a Clingy Jealous Girl. It turns out to be false: he is actually a Self-Made Man from a poor family, and the "other women" he visits are his aging mother and his younger sister, whom he economically supports behind everyone's backs.
  • Both of Nice's love rivals have the trope invoked on them. One of them is Lia, a sweet girl from a formerly rich family who's genuinely in love with Roberto and is about to go the Unlucky Childhood Friend route with him, but is pressured by her Rich Bitch mother into marrying him only for the family's benefit. The other is Roberto's original girlfriend Paula, who sees her parents lose a good part of their wealth, and after her Smug Snake father fails to steal the main family's riches he also pressures her into marrying one of the two guys. (The fact that she cheated on Roberto with Ricardo in the beginning, which is what drove her scorned boyfriend to Nice's arms in the first place, doesn't help.)
• Batman (1966):
  • The Penguin once teamed up with a gold digger who married an elderly wealthy man who, instead of dying and leaving her his estate, divorced her, and all she got from him was a race horse and some umbrellas she tried to pass as a valuable collection.
  • Penguin himself has attempted this more than once as his scheme of the week.
  • Marsha, Queen Of Diamonds, once concocted a scheme to marry Batman so that she might gain access to the giant diamond which powers the Bat-Computer.
• In an episode of The Benny Hill Show, a young woman marries Benny's character, who is shown to be a rich, older man. As she puts him through strenuous activities and almost force-feeding him junk food, the viewer can see that the wife is also having an affair with the tennis instructor. Finally, Benny's character keels over from a heart attack and the wife inherits his money. When we see her wedding to the other man, he starts force-feeding her wedding cake while making eyes at a younger bridesmaid.
• Beyond Belief: Fact or Fiction: "The Wealthy Widow" (Season 4, Episode 9A) features Dirk Sidwell, who seduces and marries a woman named Cassie Youngston, whose husband, Milo, was killed in a thresher accident two years prior, leaving her lonely but completely wealthy with a thriving dairy farm. Dirk marries Cassie for the reason of finding a strongbox full of cash hidden somewhere on the property since Milo didn't believe in banks. The farm foreman, Jake Rudolph, doesn't like Dirk and sees him for who and what he really is from the beginning, and it's either him or Milo's ghost that give him the scare of his life. However, unlike Milo, Cassie did believe in banks, having put all the money into her mutual fund account after he died to keep anyone from stealing it, since the strongbox turns up empty after it drops from the barn and kills Dirk with a blow to the head.
• The Big Bang Theory:
  • Raj gets into a relationship with one in one episode. He takes advantage of his parents' wealth to shower her with gifts, until they give him an ultimatum, to choose between his parents' money and the girl. When he tells her about this, and that he chose her, she promptly dumps him, leaving him an emotional wreck for the rest of the episode. It is later revealed that she is dating a new boyfriend whom Howard comments is "Essentially Bruce Wayne".
  • Penny often displays traits of this, often mooching off Leonard to pay for her rent and her food. When she learns that Raj is rich and that his new girlfriend is getting him to pay of her credit card bills etc she expresses regret that she didn't date Raj for a few months. In one episode she even gets mad at Leonard for not buying her Chinese food, feeling entitled to it. Sheldon also complains that Penny needs to stop freeloading off of his and Leonard's refrigerator, television, and Wi-Fi, saying that she's being lazy, selfish, and needs to start paying for her own way in life. Penny will often get irate if someone points out her freeloading.
  • In Season 1, Howard once also dated one of Penny's "friends", who, as Penny puts it, only dates men who continually buy her gifts.
  • Bert gets involved with one in Season 10 after getting a six figure grant. He's initially okay with it until the gang talk some sense into him. He dumps the girl, but quickly regrets it and wins her back by purchasing her a jetski.
• Billy the Exterminator: Ricky's ex-wife Pam. Donnie is adamant in her claim that Pam is only with Ricky and Vexcon for the money.
• Butt-Monkey The Deep's wife Cassandra in The Boys was handpicked by the Church of Happyology he joined to be his wife in a Sham Marriage, and she quickly becomes a Lady Macbeth driving him to do whatever it takes to rejoin The Seven and suck up to Homelander with little regard for his emotions, condescending to him constantly. Eventually she gets sick of his shenanigans, calling him an idiot before leaving and publishing a tell-all book ruining his reputation (again).
• Castle:
  • It's implied that this is how Martha has lost her money and why she has to live with her son now.
  • It's joked that this is how The Charmer Castle will lose all his money.
  • Martha herself inverts this trope in her relationship with the wealthy (and unseen) Chet, who dies shortly after proposing to Martha, who was planning to break up with him. Upon learning that Chet has left her a million dollars in his will, Martha initially decides to refuse the money, reasoning that he would never have bequeathed it to her had he lived and she broken up with him, and only agrees to accept it after her children insist that he would have wanted her to have it either way.
    
    She does however have an element of this trope in one sense; she's not exactly shy about charging vast amounts to her son's credit card, much to his exasperation. It is, however, abundantly clear that she loves him for far more than just his purchasing power.
• El Chapulín Colorado prevents a wealthy man from shooting his daughter's boyfriend. The man suspects all her suitors are the trope. In the boyfriend's case, the man is proven right when he (falsely) claims he's leaving his entire estate to his butler.
• Cheers: Rebecca Howe, post-Flanderization, is obsessed with any rich man she sees, in the hopes that he'll marry her and give her lots of money, making her a spineless chump. Her Humiliation Conga follows when she admits to the one man she loves that she only does so for his money, and he dumps her at the altar.
• Tracey Barlow in Coronation Street dates her grandmother's boyfriend, believing him to be a millionaire, but later finds out he was lying about being rich.
• When Sun-ah from The Devil Judge used to work as a maid at Yo-han's mansion, she would sometimes steal things like Isaac's mom's cross pendant. In the present, she admits that she likes anything that "sparkles and shines" after confessing that she used to like him; a statement Yo-han knows is false since she wanted his wealth.
• It's implied that Gabrielle Solis in Desperate Housewives originally married her husband Carlos for his money, though she does love him.
• Doctor Who: A light example in Donna Noble. She chooses to work a temping job at H.C. Clements in the city specifically because it's "nice and posh" over working as a full-time secretary for a photocopy business. Her mother Sylvia claims she's only doing it in the hopes that she would "meet a man with lots of money and your whole life would change".
• Downton Abbey:
  • Lord Grantham provides an example of the classic "male Impoverished Patrician marries industrialist's daughter" type. He admits that his sole purpose in marrying Cora (an American) was getting her dowry and inheritance from her father, a millionaire dry-goods merchant, in order to support the estate. She loves him from the start, and by the time we see them about 20 years later, he's come to love her as well and deeply regret his initial motivations. According to them, he fell in love with her in the first year of their marriage.
  • Some of Mary's suitors disappear when they learn that she will not inherit her parents' money. In the first episode of the series, Lord Grantham takes one (the Duke of Crowborough, who may have been seeking Mary as a beard as well as for her money) to task (in typical understated British fashion) for it. (Discussing this incident with Cora is the trigger for Lord Grantham's admission that he regrets his initial motives for his marriage.)
• Janine Butcher in Eastenders marries Barry Evans, then Archie Mitchell, for money.
• Charity Tate, Kim Tate, and Sadie King in Emmerdale all marry millionaires for their money. The characters Kelly Windsor and Chloe Aitkinson date rich men for their money.
• The Victim of the Week in the Father Brown episode "The Curse of Amenhotep" is the much younger second wife of Sir Raleigh Beresford. And by much younger, we mean she is younger than Sir Raleigh's adult son. She admits to her lover that she only married Sir Raleigh to get her hands on his money.
• Tanya Turner in Footballers Wives marries two men for their money.
• Frasier:
  • Niles denies that he married Maris for her money, but continues that "it was merely a delightful bonus". He's certainly deluded himself into thinking he loves her, and we never find out if it was ever really true. In one episode Martin introduces Niles to his friends and boasts that he "Married money".
  • Bebe becomes this for an old CEO with heart problems. Unfortunately for her, he dies during the wedding so she doesn't get any money (despite a rather game attempt to get through the vows with an Of Corpse He's Alive routine, all unfortunately offscreen). She did manage to steal his watch off of his corpse though.
    Niles: Well, marrying money can have its perils. Ten or fifteen years down the line, after you've adapted to a lifestyle now totally beyond your means, you can find yourself cast aside a hollow husk, penniless and crushed.
    Frasier: Niles, Big Willy's eighty-five, he's on his third pacemaker.
    Niles: Ah. [jealous] Mazel tov.
  • Frasier briefly becomes this for none other than Patrick Stewart, who gives him expensive watches and introduces him to celebrities. In turn, Frasier lets the guy kiss him and treat him like a boyfriend, constantly "forgetting" to tell Stewart's character he's straight.
  • In another episode, he's dating a very busy high-profile lawyer and starts to worry that he's a male version of the "career widow" stereotype, being constantly stood up and then bought off with expensive gifts. When he goes to a party and meets the wives of his girlfriend's male colleagues, they're all shamelessly this trope, which is one of the things that causes him to break off the relationship.
• Fresh Off the Boat: Honey has to fight hard to dispel the reputation among the ladies in the neighborhood that she's not a gold digger.
• Friends: Rachel was this in her backstory, but when the plot kicks off she has left her fiancee at the altar because she's unable to marry someone she doesn't love. She is however extremely excited when it is revealed that Monica is dating a software millionaire.
• Game of Thrones:
  • Jorah Mormont sold slaves to support his expensive wife, who left him when the money ran out.
  • Bronn marries Lollys Stokeworth for her claim, openly admitting to Tyrion Lannister that the elder sister who currently stands to inherit might suffer a riding accident. He doesn't even pretend to care about Lollys, and prefers to stone skip while she talks. That he's all about status, money, and inheritance seems to fly over her clueless head. Jaime Lannister nullifies the arrangement and promises him a new, better girl with a better castle.
• Logan's mother on Gilmore Girls is said to have met her rich and unfaithful husband in a bar. She's a Socialite and a not very affectionate mother.
• Glee:
  • Will's wife Terri. Will and the Glee Club even sing Kanye's song while Terri goes house hunting to hammer in the point. She is not, however, married to a rich man but a high school teacher. Part of why the marriage is so unhappy.
  • Santana shows shades of this. She breaks up with Puck in season one after seeing his credit score, claiming she needs financial stability from her partner. In an inner monologue, she mentions planning to marry a football player for similar reasons.
• The Hannah Montana episode "When You Wish You Were the Star" is a Wonderful Life episode in which Miley/Hannah finds herself in an Alternate Timeline, wherein, among other things, her father is married to her former homeschool teacher, who admits to a friend over the phone that she only married Robbie for his wealth and status.
• How to Get Away with Murder:
  • Michaela subverts this trope. Aidan's mother accuses her of being one, but it's clear that her interest in Aidan is not only financial.
  • Annaliese was considered one when she just married Sam. It seems both her mother and her sister in law still deem her as one.
• Janet Braddock in The Immortal (1969) is a young beautiful woman who married a wealthy older and sickly man. Everyone around her (including her husband) recognizes her motivations, but at one point she tells off one of her husband's friends: "We both know why I am with him. But because I recognize that I could be replaced very easily, I have to be very good at what I do, which is to make him happy. And I am really that good." Her husband agrees.
• Played With on Imposters. Maddie seems to do nothing but marry people and then clean out their bank accounts. However, it's revealed that she doesn't get to keep the money and instead gives it to a mysterious Doctor.
• Jessie: Rhoda Chesterfield has married six different husbands solely for their money and then got rid of them (and possibly killed some of them) after she was tired of them.
• Joe Millionaire:
  • Played with in this Fox reality show. The whole premise is that the female contestants are competing with each other for the affections of a handsome millionaire, but he's not really rich. Will true love prevail? No. He and the other winner broke up afterwards.
  • In the third season, For Richer or Poorer, one of the bachelors is a millionaire and the other is not. Although the women know this, they do not know which one is which, the idea being to try to figure out which ones are really there "for the right reasons" and which are gold-diggers. It is also played with in that one of the challenges early on involves actual panning for gold and the winner, declared the literal "biggest gold digger," wins alone time with one of the guys.
• Anomalia from a sketch by Kabaret Hrabi isn't even trying to hide it:
  Anomalia: A woman needs money, diamonds, furs and romantism! [Walerian smiles] And not just the romantism! [Walerian's face falls]
• The Last of the Baskets: In "For Richer, for Poorer", Bodkin attempts to get Clifford married to a rich girl as a solution for his financial troubles.
• The Law & Order franchise:
  • The defendant in the Law & Order episode "True North" takes this to psychopathic levels — she murdered a rich man's wife so that she could marry him. Then after a year of marriage during which she "spent his money like water", she tries steal $2 million dollars from his account, then has a friend kill him and his daughter. During her trial, another friend mentions that as early as high school, she would peruse magazines and make lists of rich men who she intended to pursue. Her friend also mentions that she was dumped by a rich boyfriend during this time and although they both spin it as him cruelly doing so because of her poor background, it's highly likely that he realized she was trying to pull The Baby Trap in order to get her hands on his money.
  • Law & Order: Special Victims Unit:
    • In one episode, the detectives realize that their Victim of the Week was this when they review her employment history and notice that everywhere she worked was someplace where she could meet wealthy men.
    • In another episode, the victim is noted to have been extremely picky and demanding about what her boyfriends gave her; one tells the detectives that she threw a fit when he gave her perfume instead of jewelry. She ended up having a surprisingly sympathetic motivation: her younger sister was forced into prostitution and gold digging was the only way the Victim of the Week could think to earn enough money to buy her freedom. She wanted jewelry because it had a monetary value and she could sell it, while the perfume was useless for that purpose.
• Subverted in the second episode of Lewis. A beautiful young woman is married to a wealthy man who is twice her age, paralyzed from the waist down, and a rude jerk on his best days. The husband is perfectly aware of her motive and admits that it's an experiment: in the event of divorce she gets nothing, after his death she gets the lot, so he'd like to see how long she can last. Then she saves his life, and, astonished that she rejected her chance, he confesses that in fact he loves her. Double subverted in the reveal: she was plotting to indirectly murder him and only kept him alive to get a crucial secret out of him, and the marriage was only for the money after all.
• Lie to Me provides a subversion: One of their clients finds out that his fiancee was after his money at first, but then genuinely fell in love with him. The team points out that he's not innocent of this either, only in terms of beauty. Yes, he loves her, but it doesn't hurt that she's a knock-out. They suggest a prenup, though.
• Lost:
  • Nikki. Before the crash, she pretended to love a film director from Sydney long enough for her to poison him, and then get a bunch of diamonds worth millions of dollars. They didn't help her much on the island, though.
  • Sawyer is a male example. He makes a living by having affairs with women who are married to wealthy men, and then stealing their money. Some of his techniques were picked up from Locke's dad.
  • Shannon likewise is into wealthy men, and makes a living by conning her rich stepbrother out of his cash.
• A significant percentage of the female characters on Mad Men:
  • Pete and Trudy Campbell's marriage is a slightly more complicated take on the issue — he's from a socially prominent, very old family (back to New Amsterdam on his mother's side) that hasn't been doing too well financially (his maternal grandfather was an idiot and his father was a spendthrift); her parents are vulgar Nouveau Riche, and loaded in the extreme. Both clans are not-so-subtly backing them to improve the standing of everyone concerned. The marriage starts rocky, then they are happy for a while, but then it goes into the crapper. A large part of Pete's early success in the firm is due to him getting the Vicks account due to his father-in-law being an executive with the company. When the father-in-law finds out that Pete is cheating on Trudy, he pulls the account and costs Pete and the firm a lot of money.
  • Early on in the series Ken Cosgrove expresses the sentiment that he would love to marry a rich woman whose executive father would give Ken a big account for the firm. However, when Ken does in fact marry such a woman, he steadfastly refuses to mix his family life with business and is shown to be highly successful even without his wife's money.
  • Don's new wife Megan has at least a touch of diggerism, though she is shown to be genuinely talented at advertising and does seem to genuinely love Don. She later uses the financial security afforded by her marriage to start an acting career. The fact that she spends so long away from Don as an actress means his eye starts wandering again...
• A non-romantic variation shows up in an episode of Mama's Family wherein Vinton believes he is adopted. A prospective birth mother appears, but she balks upon learning that Vint is not a banker ("securities") as she had surmised but rather a locksmith ("security systems").
• Married... with Children:
  • Jefferson D'Arcy is often referred to in-show as a "trophy husband"; never works, preferring to leech off Marcy's banker income. In something of a twist, for all his cockiness when she's not around, in his relationship with Marcy it's made pretty clear that he's nevertheless a spineless doormat almost completely under her thumb as a result. Marcy does keep trying to make Jefferson get a job, but whenever he actually gets one he typically ends up having beautiful women as coworkers and customers. That leads a jealous Marcy to force Jefferson to quit and return to his de facto job as her sex toy.
  • Kelly occasionally plays this role. Ironically, despite Al typically being a Boyfriend-Blocking Dad who beats up most of Kelly's boyfriends, he actively encourages the relationship whenever she lands a rich guy, mostly so he can exploit it for his own gain. Unfortunately, her attempts tend to blow up in her face.
  • Peg is a Lazy Bum who rarely does any housework — her most notable housework involves being a Lethal Chef, mostly in the early seasons. Her most recognizable activity, other than watching TV, is spending money on whatever frivolous trinkets that catch her fancy (on Al's dime, obviously). Kelly has taken this attitude about work and men after her.
• Major Frank Burns from M*A*S*H, probably. It's mentioned more than once that he married for money (far from the only thing he does that's motivated by greed), which is the biggest reason he is never willing to leave his wife for Major Houlihan.
• Midsomer Murders:
  • In "Death of a Hollow Man", Kitty Carmichael, Esslyn's young wife, is clearly out for her husband's money - to the point that the only reason why they got married at all was because she got pregnant and guilted him into it. She's carrying on an affair behind Esslyn's back (with the actor playing Mozart, appropriately enough), and when Esslyn finds out and begins divorce proceedings, she quickly begins scouting around for new meal tickets - to the point that Kitty becomes a suspect for his murder. She even reveals that she's been carrying on an affair with Tim Young and tries to blackmail him into becoming her meal ticket.
  • In "Tainted Fruit", Melissa tells Sally Rickworth to marry multi-millionaire Frederick Bentine-Brown (who had proposed to Sally) and divorce him in a year or two and take his money.
  • "Bad Tidings": Even at high school, Cully's friend Lynn said she planned to marry someone rich. Now, ten years later, she is married to Matthew Spearman; a wealthy businessman much older than she is.
• Modern Family: Gloria is accused of this at one point by Claire, since she's much, much younger and more attractive than her wealthy husband, Jay (Claire's father). However, viewing even one or two episodes of the show will prove it's not true. Gloria certainly likes the fact that Jay is rich, but that isn't why she married him. Jay, meanwhile, is happy to spoil her with clothes and vacations and the like, but isn't a Henpecked Husband by any stretch, and isn't afraid to stand his ground against her. Heck, she realized she was in love with him during their first fight. It's discussed multiple times that Gloria could've easily become this if she wanted to; she's so beautiful, many men before (and after) Jay have proposed to her, including men wealthier than him. (Manny thinks one might have been a Kennedy.) Given that she was very poor and raising a young son more or less by herself, she'd have had perfectly understandable and even sympathetic reasons for marrying someone for their money, but she didn't. She waited until she met the right man so she could Marry for Love. It just so happened that the right man was pretty well-off.
• Murdoch Mysteries: Thaddeus Walsh married Abigail Marshall for the money and land she inherited from her father. When Abigail tried to turn the land into a bird sanctuary, Walsh had her institutionalized, sold the land to a slaughterhouse, and put his and Abigail's daughter up for adoption.
• MythBusters in their "Laws of Attraction Special" the Mythbusters showed a series of men's dating profiles to a control group of women and asked them to rate them on their attractiveness. They then showed the same profiles to another group but changed some of the information on selected individuals to give them better paying jobs. The result? A 30% increase in their desirability rating.
• Downplayed in The Nanny. Jokes are often made about Fran being a gold digger and her sole ambition being to marry a rich professional man, particularly a doctor. She is also very attracted to Maxwell's wealth, but at the same time she does genuinely love him and the Sheffield children, and it has been shown on several occasions that she would be happy being with him if he were poor.
• Julie Cooper in The O.C. married Caleb Nichol for his money.
• Fan Sheng Mei from Ode to Joy pursues rich men to elevate her status and support her family.
• Parks and Recreation:
  • Ron's first wife Tammy (not a missing comma; his first wife of two, both named Tammy) briefly tries to get back together with him when it becomes clear that Ron, an extreme libertarian, has amassed a good deal of savings which he has converted into gold and buried in various places around his property in case an economic meltdown should devalue government currency. As Leslie points out, she is literally a gold digger.
  • Side character Jessica Wicks, a local former beauty pageant winner, married the much older Nick Newport Sr., the owner of the local candy manufacturer Sweetums.
  • Played around with for Tom, who attempts to get into Jessica's good graces so that once Nick dies, she'll turn to him for comfort. He even describes himself as a "gold-digger digger". The plan never works out, naturally.
• Raven's Home: Chelsea had a lot of money due to an invention of hers. Her ex-husband took her cash, cheated on her, and ended up in jail for tax fraud when it turned out that the woman he cheated with was a federal agent.
• In Revenge (2011), Victoria assumes this about Emily and her interest in Daniel. Emily is actually rich on her own, but allows Victoria to find evidence that suggests she's right because Victoria learning her real secret would be even more damaging.
• The titular anti-heroine of Rubí, who essentially screws around with the lives of her best friend and their respective romantic interests just because she wants to marry into riches and her true love isn't rich enough for her. In the original, and almost every remake, she's anviliciously killed; in one Mexican remake, she just leaves her former circle to live Happily Ever After and direct her charms at unsuspecting foreign millionaires...
• Discussed in The Sarah Jane Adventures: Clyde cites this as a reason to check up on Sarah Jane's new beau.
• Schitt's Creek: Averted. Moira Rose most likely appeared to be a golddigger prior to the family going broke. The White-Dwarf Starlet and former soap star relished spending her husband Johnny's money, especially on clothes. Yet, even after Johnny goes broke and the destitute family is forced into rural exile, Moira remains a devoted and loving wife to Johnny and never once considers leaving him.
• Marcus in Seacht is a male gold digger, leeching off Joanne.
• Elaine in Seinfeld is not above this and at one point tries to restart things with her Amicable Ex Jerry upon discovering that he's wealthier than she had realized.
• Shake it Up: In "Match it Up", Deuce's first girlfriend, Savannah, is this, dumping Deuce for someone with more money. When Deuce wins the chance to get 10,000 dollars, she comes back to him. Rocky and Cece trick her into revealing her true nature by having Ty pose as an internet billionaire. Deuce dumps her soon after.
• Several of these show up in Tales from the Crypt, naturally getting what they deserve.
  • "Lover, Come Hack to Me" has a man marrying a woman whom he plans to kill on their wedding night to inherit her money. Said woman turns out to be a yandere who murders him after they make love in order to ensure time doesn't spoil their love.
  • "Dead Right" has a woman marry a man because a psychic predicted he would inherit a vast fortune and die soon after. Of course, there's a Prophecy Twist: she wins the money in a contest, breaks up with him in a cruel manner, and he kills her. He inherits her money, and gets the chair soon after,
  • In "Split Personality", Joe Pesci plays a man who pretends to have a twin brother so he can marry a set of twins and inherit their whole fortune. When the girls find out there's only one, they decide to share him... by cutting him down the middle and each taking half.
  • Part of the twist ending in "The Switch". The love interest turns out to be this, and marries the guy whose youth the protagonist bought.
• If Teresa from the series of the same name used her lawyering talent, she easily could become rich and well positioned in high society. But noo, she has to marry herself out of poverty to get back to the people who revealed her humble origins back in high school, so she ends dumping and reconciliating with men depending on how wealthy they are, and ignoring or outright denying she's related to her humble relatives. Eventually, her sleazy ways catch up with her spectacularly when by the end, after an attack of conscience, she decides to dump a guy she was seducing to secure her economical status and get back with the one she loved the most, but by then practically no one in the soap wants anything with her anymore.
• The Twilight Zone (1959): In "A Short Drink from a Certain Fountain", Flora worked in a chorus line when she met the wealthy Harmon Gordon, 40 years her senior, who soon fell in love with her. It is clear that she married him for his money as she has no affection for him and bullies him at every turn.
• Upstairs Downstairs features one confirmed gold digger, Frederick the cockney footman, who uses his good looks to hook a rich woman and who eventually moves to Hollywood - shortly before the advent of the talkies. On the other hand, Richard Bellamy, one of the major characters, is suspected by his father-in-law of being a gold digger to the point that he ties up Lady Marjorie's money so Richard can't get to it after she dies. It is true that Richard was a poor parson's son who aspired to the hand of an earl's daughter and used his marital connections to build his career in Parliament. However, he actually did love Lady Marjorie and was devastated by her death.
• One emblematic example is Maria Fatima of Vale Tudo, a poor-to-middle-class young woman who makes it the mission of her life to marry into a rich clan no matter how, to the horror of her way more honest mother Raquel. While Fatima does find her Meal Ticket, the "anything goes" method she used to get it caused more problems to her than if she had just worked for her money.
• Kendall Casablancas in Veronica Mars. Mentioned within the show, even by her stepsons. Her husband also seems to have little illusions about her just being there to look good, but he probably didn't expect her to sleep around with one of his sons' friends behind his back.
• Karen on Will & Grace is generally assumed to be this, as both Grace and Karen herself have said. Some scenes do make it clear that she loves Stan, though.
• The Wire: Bernard's girlfriend, Squeak, loves expensive jewelry. So much that he skims money from drug sales so she can indulge herself. When the Barksdale gang finds out, he gets a beating and is demoted to buying burner phones.
• Young Sheldon: Discussed in S5 E3. Mary and Sheldon try to convince Missy not to quit school, saying that getting a job without a diploma is harder for women. Missy counters that she plans to marry someone rich.

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