Blackmail Backfire / Live-Action TV

Blackmail Backfires in Live-Action TV series.

---

• In Belgravia: Stephen and John Bellasis attempt to blackmail Lady Brockenhurst to pay off Stephen's gambling debts by using her unknown connection to young businessman Charles Pope. The scheme blows up in their faces in all sorts of ways (part of this happens in the original novel): Stephen's direct attempt is rebuffed by Lady Brockenhurst because she has enough leverage to ensure he doesn't get a cent of it until her husband dies, and she's intent on revealing Charles as her grandson in due course. John on the other hand discovers that not only is Charles Lady Brockenhurst's grandson, but also the secret heir of her deceased son Edmund, making John's prospects nonexistent.
• On Better Off Ted, Veronica helps a CEO find a file he secreted back in 1962 packed with secret and damaging information to prevent his board from forcing him out. When they find it, Veronica is confused to read the file's notes on smoking causing cancer and the dangers of various building materials. It turns out the CEO hasn't updated the folder since he hid it and thus all the "secrets" are things that have been public knowledge for years.
• The Boys (2019):
  • In the first episode, the mayor of Baltimore is trying to negotiate a contract for the superhero Nubian Prince. Madelyn Stillwell, a high ranking executive, says the price is $300 million a year, but he tries to lower it to $200 million, when she insists that the $300 million price is not negotiable, he says $200 million, and he won't tell anyone about Compound V, and blow the lid on the lie that super heroes were created by God to protect mankind. Stillwell insists on the $300 million price tag, and urges him to reconsider. Later, as the mayor and his son are flying back home, they see Homelander out the window, he gives them a friendly wave hello, and uses his Eye Beams to bring down the private plane.
  • This forms an important part of the Boys' Backstory when they tried to blackmail Lamplighter into becoming The Mole within the Seven. Instead Lamplighter tried to murder their boss, CIA chief Mallory in retaliation, killing her grandchildren by accident.
  • In the sixth episode of season 1, Starlight is brought to a meeting with Stillwell in light of her revealing at the Believe Expo that she was recently sexually assaulted. Stillwell tries to get Starlight to toe the company line by threatening to fire her, only for Starlight to counter that it would be corporate suicide to fire her right after she went public about being sexually assaulted, and she's got a strong suspicion that Stillwell not only knows who Starlight is accusing (the Deep), she and the others at Vought have covered for him when he's done this to others in the past. Realizing she's well and truly over a barrel, Stillwell backs down.
  • In the season 2 finale, Mallory tries to do this to get White House Chief of Staff Bob Singer to fight back on the plans to spread Compound V to the general population. Too bad Singer is so sick of this mess, he practically begs Mallory to give him an excuse to resign.
    Mallory: Here's what we do have, Bob-
    Singer: Oh, let me guess. A tape of me fucking my kids' nanny at her daughter's quinceañera? Release it. Please. I'm begging you. A plum gig at Fox and this shithole in my rearview? Sounds dreamy.
  • In Season 3, when Starlight tries to blackmail Homelander by threatening to leak the footage of the Flight 37 incident, Homelander only pauses long enough to close the door to the room they're in before proceeding, with cold menace in his words, to dare Starlight to go ahead and leak said footage so that he'll have nothing to lose and be able to truly cut loose with his power and cause all the chaos and destruction he's truly capable of.
• Happens a lot on Brooklyn Nine-Nine either by crooks or the cops themselves.
  • Police union boss O'Sullivan tells Holt that if doesn't help cover up a police issue, "I will put out rumors speculating that you are homosexual." Holt dryly points out that he came out thirty years earlier. Later in that same episode, it's showcased that O'Sullivan tried to blackmail Rosa by threatening to release proof that she was bisexual. Rosa immediately said that she had already come out, leading to O'Sullivan saying the following:
    O'Sullivan: Oh, come on! You can't blackmail anyone anymore!
• In season 10 of Chicago Fire, Emma tries to worm her way to take Violet's place on the team, smugly brushing off her rough entry with "eventually they'll love me." When she discovers Violet and Hawkins are involved, Emma threatens to file an official report on the pair unless Violet is transferred and Emma gets her slot. When a deadly house fire breaks out, Emma shows her true colors by fleeing, leaving Violet and a pregnant woman behind. After Violet saves the woman, Hawkins coldly tells Emma she's done at Station 51. He adds Emma can go ahead and file whatever report she wants as now that everyone saw her abandon her partner and a pregnant civilian to save her own skin, no firehouse in Chicago is going to accept her.
• Blackmail happens once or twice a season on Columbo, and it almost always ends badly either for the blackmailer or the murderer themselves (who are sometimes the same person). In most cases the motive is money, but once or twice the blackmailer is a lonely woman who is in love with the killer and wants to force them into marriage — in one such case, the killer is relieved to be caught just to avoid this fate. Nine times out of ten, the killer either murders the blackmailer, or the blackmailer becomes the murderer after their victim threatens to expose them. The second pilot is perhaps the only time the killer actually agrees to pay the blackmailer off, and even that doesn't work because the "blackmailer" in question was working with Columbo the whole time.
• In CSI's "Pilot", Warrick gave a bad tip on a game to a corrupt judge in exchange for a warrant. A few episodes later, in "Pledging Mr. Johnson", the judge tries to blackmail him into compromising evidence on a rape case, but he confides in Grissom and talks to the judge while wearing a wire.
• Daredevil: In "The Path of the Righteous", James Wesley finds out that Karen Page and Ben Urich paid a visit to Wilson Fisk's mother Marlene Vistain. He kidnaps Karen, takes her to a warehouse, and tries to threaten her into backing off on her investigation of Fisk by threatening to have her friends and loved ones killed. He further emphasizes this threat by leaving a loaded gun on the table in front of him. However, he also makes a point of mentioning that Fisk has no idea that he's here (as Fisk is in the hospital tending to his girlfriend, who's been poisoned). So when Wesley's phone rings as Fisk tries to call him, Karen grabs the gun and shoots him to death with it, ensuring that his knowledge of who else knows Fisk's secrets is taken to the grave with him. Fisk never finds out the truth about what happened to Wesley until Karen reveals it to him late in season 3.
• Doctor Who: In "Silver Nemesis", one of the bad guys is a seventeenth century sorceress who makes a big deal of claiming that she knows a deep, dark secret about the Doctor, and threatens to reveal it to everyone present if he doesn't hand over control of a powerful alien super weapon to her. After apparently looking very shifty and worried, the Doctor ends up calling her bluff, and it turns out the other faction there, the Cybermen, don't care about it anyway. She doesn't react well.
• Elementary: In the season two episode "Dead Man's Switch", Charles Augustus Milverton also gets killed by one of blackmail victims, like the original. It turns as be more complicated as the killer, Anthony Pistone had previously confronted Milverton, but was deterred by being offered into the business, and his real motivation for killing Milverton was to take his place.
• Forever (2014) episode "Social Engineering" has this happen to protagonist Dr. Henry Morgan twice. First, a member of a hacktivist group discovers Henry's official records (medical degree, birth certificate, etc.) just appeared in the system six years ago; she knows he's a fraud, but has no idea the reason (immortality). She threatens to send a message to his colleagues exposing the fakes unless he helps her fake her own death. Henry refuses, preferring exposure. Another hacker manipulates a walk light to get her hit by a car and she ends up in the hospital. This second hacker, about whom the first knew embarrassing information, sabotages the life support and threatens Henry to let her die, or they will not only expose him as a fraud, but put his face all over the internet, making it very difficult to start a new identity again. Henry again chooses to do what's right, saving the first blackmailer's life, and this time his blackmailer chooses to end her own life rather than carry out her threat. In the end, the first blackmailer chooses to undo the damage by creating new, better-faked records for Henry, saving his current identity.
• Gen V: In "The Whole Truth", Tek Knight threatens to pin Golden Boy's death on Dean Shetty. Since Shetty doesn't want Tek Knight to uncover that she's overseeing the creation of a virus that only kills Supes, she counter-blackmails him by threatening to go public about his terminal brain tumor, which compels him to get intimate with anything with a hole. Like a hose, traffic cones, or even donuts.
• The Good Wife: Kalinda threatens to get child services to take drug kingpin Lemond Bishop's son to force him to allow one of his dealers to testify to Cary's innocence in his drug trial. Bishop seemingly acquiesces, but then orders the dealer to falsely incriminate Cary instead to teach Kalinda a lesson, which leads to Cary deciding to plead guilty.
• Gotham: At the end of season 4, when the new Joker and his cult have placed bombs all over Gotham and are demanding its complete evacuation within six hours, a collection of Gotham's other criminals led by the Penguin decide to blackmail him by stealing the trigger device and convince the Joker to demand an additional fifteen million dollars from the Mayor. When this proves too inconvenient, the Joker instead blows up the guy holding the trigger with a bazooka (since he had a back-up already, albeit one that is slightly more difficult to implement), bumps up his schedule, and orders his goons to kill Penguin and his lackeys.
• Played with on The Guest Book. The first season has a running plot where Wilfred, the man who rents out Froggy Cottage, pays a visit to the local Bikini Bar where the proprietor Vivian takes pictures of him receiving the local service. She threatens to give the pictures to Wilfred's wife Emma if he doesn't allow her to use Froggy Cottage for some nefarious means. After Wilfred gets his doctor neighbor and the doctor's police officer girlfriend involved, they get her to back down. Then Wilfred discovers this trope would have taken effect if he'd just refused to give in to Vivian's offer. Emma tells him she saw his truck parked in front of the bar and knew he'd gone there. Wilfred's dumbfounded look says everything.
• headLand: Sasha finds out that Adam's girlfriend MJ is working as a pole dancer and attempts to threaten her into breaking up with him. MJ simply replies, "How do you think we met?"
• On Homeland, Carrie and Saul find out that a Middle Eastern ambassador is gay and try to blackmail him into giving them information. He shrugs it off, saying that his family and his government already know.
• Jake and the Fatman: In "Second Time Round", a famous attorney is being blackmailed. His devoted secretary offers to kill the blackmailer. But instead she fakes the blackmailer's death. Then five years later the blackmailer turns up alive and is now blackmailing the secretary who is now married to the attorney running for governor. Unable to pay him off, the wife lures the blackmailer into a rendezvous, then shoots him while he is embracing her.
• Jessica Jones (2015): Season 3, Jessica meets a man named Erik Gelden, who has the superhuman power that he can instantly feel if people are "evil" (or at least if they did something morally questionable). He uses this ability to blackmail three of these people into paying him to keep quiet, but neglects to properly research his victims first to learn what exactly it is they did, and more importantly if they are likely to retaliate or not. Sure enough, his third victim, Gregory Sallinger, has Erik and Jessica attacked, severely injuring the latter and thus kicking off the plot.
• The King of Queens: Subverted big-time in "Wild Cards." After a heated argument, Deacon threatens to tell his and Doug's wives the truth about the guys' recent actions... and follows through on it after Doug claims to not care. Worse, Doug's wife is infamous for being less forgiving than Deacon's.
• In one episode of Law & Order: Criminal Intent, a suspect tries to get blackmail material on Logan by recording a conversation in which Logan appears to accept a bribe... only for Logan to pull out his own recording device and reveal that the whole thing was a sting.
• Subverted in Lois & Clark: A blackmailer finds evidence of Superman's secret identity and blackmails him into robbing a jeweler. Superman would rather have his identity exposed but the blackmailer, anticipating Superman would make this choice, abducted his parents.
• In the Malcolm in the Middle episode where Malcolm buys a used computer from a neighbor, he finds evidence of the neighbor's affairs with several neighborhood women in the form of graphic e-mails and pictures, which he shares with his brother Reese. Reese has just been forced by their mother Lois to provide free manual labor for the neighbor after Reese vandalized his house, but tells the neighbor that he knows about the affairs, so the neighbor agrees to do whatever Reese says so long as his wife doesn't find out. A few days later, as the neighbor picks up Reese from school, a teacher asks him if he's Reese's father, and demands to speak with him. When he returns back to the car, Reese chastises him for taking too long and to hurry up and drive him where he wants to go. The neighbor then tells Reese that he had a very interesting chat with his teacher and that they're going to go shopping for the supplies Reese needs to fix the damage he did. When Reese threatens to tell his wife, the neighbor calls his bluff by threatening to tell Lois about the trouble he's been causing in school. In the end, Reese goes back to providing free labor for the neighbor, accepting that he's more afraid of Lois than his neighbor is of his wife.
• On Melrose Place, Michael and Peter fire Sydney as the receptionist at their medical practice. The ever-conniving Sydney hits back with a sworn statement citing evidence of their "harassment" of her (backed by her past with Michael) and forces them to hire her back or have a very public lawsuit that will drag the firm down. The next season, Peter (having just been cleared of murder charges) discovers that to pay off his debts, Sydney basically sold his house and belongings behind his back. An irate Peter fires her with Sydney threatening him with the lawsuit.
  Peter: I was just in jail, Sydney. For murder. A sexual harassment suit will be a day at the beach.
• A minor example in The Middle: Sue catches Axl coming home late one night and threatens to expose him if he doesn't drive her and her friends around. He complies for a while but eventually gets fed up, calls their mom to confess, then kicks Sue out of the car (fairly far away from home) and drives off without her. They both wind up grounded.
• Midsomer Murders:
  • In "The Killings at Badger's Drift", Iris and Dennis Rainbird make a lot of money by blackmailing their neighbours, but they bite off more than they could chew when they try their spiel on murderous couple Michael and Katherine and get brutally killed.
  • In "Strangler's Wood", the second Victim of the Week put together who the murderer was and thought she'd try a bit of blackmail, not realising that the murderer was playing for stakes so high they wouldn't hesitate to bump her off too.
  • The first and second victims in "Tainted Fruit tried to blackmail the murderer, who killed them instead.
  • The second Victim of the Week in "A Grain of Truth" was looking for the money from his blackmail scheme and then he is hit on the head by a bag of grain.
• The Monk episode "Mr. Monk and the Twelfth Man" involves a man who killed his first wife and hid the corpse. Then a workman fell off his roof and sued him, and the jury on that case came to his house to examine the scene. One of the jurors, snooping for something to steal, managed to discover incriminating evidence and then blackmailed him. The juror is a gambling addict and as such continuously keeps on asking for money, and eventually the man decides that killing the blackmailer is the best solution. Of course, he doesn't know who he is, but he just needs to go through twelve possibilities...
  • This trope tends to happen in the show a lot. It’s telling that only a few blackmailers manage to avert this trope, one of whom does it by using his position as a forensic scientist to tamper with the evidence against the murderer and frame an innocent delivery boy. This all but ensures that the killer needs this man to avoid being arrested.
• Murdoch Mysteries:
  • One season 2 episode's blackmailer survives, but faces accessory to murder charges for covering up the crime.
  • Invoked in one season 8 episode to trick the killer into murdering a supposed blackmailer. One of the victim's enemies (who knows that the killer committed a previous murder but has no intention of blackmailing him over it) tricks the killer into thinking that the victim knew about the previous murder and wanted to blackmail him. The panicked killer then kills his supposed blackmailer, just as the third person planned.
• In an episode of The Newsroom, Jeff Daniels' character faces off against an immoral journalist that tries to blackmail him into becoming a 'silent partner' in a restaurant — he pretends to go along with it, and then gives her a "The Reason You Suck" Speech and tells her that if she and her co-conspirators try to come after him, he'll dedicate every moment of his very influential news program to ruining her life. He then walks out, telling her that a restaurant is a bad investment.
• No Ordinary Family:
  • In "No Ordinary Vigilante", Daphne uses her mind-reading powers to find out a store clerk is stealing from the cash register. She tries to blackmail him into providing beer for a Wild Teen Party. The clerk quickly points out that she has no hard evidence against him and calls the police on her for underage drinking.
  • In "No Ordinary Sidekick", Chiles finds proof that Dr. King has been making a super serum and threatens to tell the government. He's probably planning to blackmail King for money or his job back, but before he can get around to that, King smugly says that Chiles inadvertently contributed to the super serum project and will also be incriminated if he goes to the authorities. Chiles leaves in defeat, and is later killed by King's enforcer to ensure his silence.
• Our Flag Means Death: In episode 5, Izzy tries to blackmail Lucius into doing chores by threatening to reveal that he's slept with or drawn several other crew members. Lucius then freely announces this to the others gathered nearby, to which Pete laughs and says that he's drawn most of them.
• The Outpost: Marshal Withers tries to use his discovery that Gwen is really Princess Rosmund in order to gain leverage and further control of the outpost, pointing out that he has letters exposing this secret which will go to the Prime Order "in the event of my untimely death." Rosmund simply states that he'll still be alive... and working in the lowest levels of the mines.
• Perry Mason: This happens to about 95% of the blackmailers who appear on the show (a few do manage to get away relatively unscathed). Quite a few of them end up murdered over the course of the show, and many others are arrested for their blackmail, perjury, or in at least one case a murder connected to the blackmail. A downplayed example from "The Case of the Capering Camera" had a previous victim of the blackmail racket based on I Was Young and Needed the Money pictures simply dare them to go ahead (notably the murderer of the episode wasn't one of the blackmail victims, but rather the blackmailer, with the victim being his Guilt-Ridden Accomplice).
  Katherine Ames: I wrote back publish and go to blazes. I'm proud of my figure.
• In Perry Mason (2020), Perry (then a private eye) gets photos of a noted movie comic in bed with an up-and-coming star. Rather than a simple payout of $200, Perry demands $600 or he goes to the press. Perry stupidly does this even when he's facing more men besides the studio chief in an empty room and even brought the negatives with him. He ends up beaten, a hot gun burned onto his chest and paid a single dollar. Perry is forced to admit "I overplayed it."
• Psych: This has turned out to be the motivation behind quite a few murders on the show.
  • In Gus' Dad May Have Killed An Old Guy, the murder victim was a blackmailer who had dirt on several people on his street, and used a telescope in a high window to spy on everyone specifically for this purpose. When he started going senile from old age, one of his former victims finally decided to kill him to shut him up once and for all.
  • An attempt at this is the motivation behind the killer in Let's Get Hairy. A Psycho Psychologist is carrying on an affair with one of his patients. When he tries to end it, she threatens to tell his wife. He tries to solve this dilemma by having her killed, and pinning it on another patient who thinks he's a werewolf.
  • In If You're So Smart, Then Why Are You Dead?, the victim of the week was a teacher who tried blackmailing two of his students at different times, several years apart. Both times, it backfired completely. One attacked him on the spot; while he was expelled, the teacher didn't get the money he wanted. The other one blew up his house while he was sleeping inside, killing him.
• The Punisher (2017): CIA Agent Bill Rawlins (the architect of "Project Cerberus" and the man who ordered the death of the Castle family) is able to convince his superior, Deputy Director Marion James, to allow him to continue trying to finish off Frank Castle and David "Micro" Lieberman and thus finally silence all witnesses of Cerberus and keep the Agency from being publicly shamed. Director James is utterly disgusted with the atrocities Rawlins has done, however, and so orders him to retire from the Agency once he's done with the loose ends. When Rawlins mentions her complicity with said actions in an attempt to get leverage and thus remain in the Agency, she immediately fires back that he will take the offer she's giving him or she will personally expose him to Homeland Security and to hell with her career.
• In the reamke of Roots, Dr. William Waller calls up his slaves Toby (Kunta Kinte), his wife Belle, and their daughter Kizzy to to his home office to discuss the death of Noah, a slave who was killed while trying to run away. Dr. Waller deduces that Kizzy had become literate and helped Noah forge "freedom papers," and as a punishment, and financial restitution, Dr. Waller sold Kizzy to another plantation owner, Tom Leah. While Kizzy's dragged away by some slave traders and Belle tries to help her, Kunta stays in the office and tells Dr. Waller to cancel the sale of Kizzy, or he'll tell everyone that his niece Missy, is actually his biological daughter, and Dr. Waller snaps back that he better not say anything because no one will believe the words of a slave, and he may even be killed for trying to soil the honor of woman who comes from a good family. After hearing that, Kunta rushes out of the house to try and free Kizzy from the slave traders, but he and Belle are beaten back, and all they can do is tearfully call out Kizzy's name as she's taken from them.
• Sherlock: The whole of the episode "His Last Vow" is a slow set-up towards this. If Magnussen, the so-called "Napoleon of Blackmail", had not kept on bullying the Holmeses and the Watsons out of a petty desire to showcase his control over them, Sherlock wouldn't have figured out that all of the blackmail information he has was located in his head (and only his head), and wouldn't have been angry enough to deal with the threat thusly. Magnussen unknowingly dodges a bullet earlier when his continuous dangling of Mary Watson's (nee Morstan's) past to make John do what he wants nearly make Mary (who in this version is apparently a retired assassin, presumably for the CIA) kill him; only to be thwarted because John and Sherlock entered the office while she was talking to Magnussen.
• In the third season of Succession, Logan tries to get the President relax/drop the ongoing DOJ investigation into Waystar-Royco by having ATN run stories questioning the President's mental faculties. Rather than cave, the President simply publicly announces he is no longer running for re-election, forcing the Roys to curry favor with the next Presidential hopefuls.
• Svensson Svensson: Gustav is trying to blackmail Max into doing garden work on top of what they had agreed on. Gustav threatens by mentioning the mountain bike that Max wants. However, Max has none of it and explains to Lena about the bribery deal Gustav made with the children.
• The 1989 mini-series Twist of Fate has SS Colonel Helmut von Schreader hunted for his part in a failed plot against Hitler. He hatches a desperate plan to get plastic surgery and then pose a Jewish prisoner named Ben Grossman. He ends up in the wrong camp and, upon being freed, circumstances soon lead him to become a major fighter for Israeli independence and marrying a Jewish woman. 25 years later, he's a well-regarded colonel in the Israeli army when two former SS buddies come to him and demand he supply them with some uranium or they'll expose his identity. Smirking, Grossman asks which of these two wanted Nazi war criminals is going to be the one to testify in an Israeli court (without any actual evidence) that a concentration camp survivor turned war hero was once an SS officer. Realizing Grossman is right, the Nazis go to the back-up plan of threatening Grossman's wife and son. He seems cowed but really goes to his long-time friend who's a high-ranking Mossad agent. Grossman sells the story that he was on vacation when they found him, claiming to recognize the two while in the concentration camp and they're threatening his family to force him along. His friend buys it and soon comes up with a scheme of Grossman pretending to pass the uranium as a sting.
• The Umbrella Academy: The secret organization called the Majestic 12 is working with Reginald Hargreaves until they have JFK assassinated, at which point he tries to break ties with them. They threaten to expose him unless he keeps providing them with his technology. This only convinces him he needs to take more drastic measures, and he reveals his true alien face (which they appear to have been unaware of) before slaughtering them.
• The Unusuals:
  • Henry Cole is a God-fearing upstanding cop, but he used to be a Texas criminal. His old partner tracks Henry down and blackmails him into pulling some jobs. Henry tires of this and kills his blackmailer.
  • Cole may have also been involved in the Plot-Triggering Death of Walsh's former partner, who might have been blackmailing him too. It is never fully resolved.

---