Warning: Be wary of spoilers. On this page, titles alone can (and will) be Walking Spoilers.
Kansas City Shuffles in Live-Action TV series.
- In the 30 Rock episode "Game Over", Jack plans to expose Kaylee Hooper, the granddaughter of Kabletown CEO Hank Hooper, as ineligible to inherit because Kaylee might not be related to Hank after all. Kaylee figures out his plan and avoids it by planting Jenna's DNA for Jack to find and test, instead of her own (thus making Jack look like a conniving traitor for trying to mail Hank an unauthorized paternity test that doesn't prove anything). However, the only thing Hank Hooper loves more than his family is his birthday. The DNA was a distraction to prevent Kaylee from doing anything to celebrate Hank's birthday, whereas the envelope of DNA results actually contained a birthday card from Jack.
- The A-Team:
- B.A Baracus becomes Genre Savvy in one episode when he gets very suspicious about being handed a burger shortly after hearing about the option of flying. He forces Murdock to give him his burger, the latter biting into B.A's burger and falling asleep because of all the drugs they put in it. B.A is satisfied of this outcome... only to then fall asleep after eating Murdock's burger since that one was drugged in the first place and Murdock was actually faking it.
- B.A later goes through a complex version when he repeatedly swaps burgers with his teammates like in the previous example. He does impressively well... only for him to fall asleep again along with Hannibal implying that he flopped at the last swap since he deduced that the last burger expected to be drugged was the one he had in the first place.
- When Hannibal, B.A. and Face are going to face a military firing squad, Murdock shows up at the island prison disguised as a priest. It doesn't take long for them to stumble onto his identity as the priest Murdock waylaid shows up, head bandaged, to forgive Murdock. What the soldiers don't know is this "priest" is really the team's new ally Frankie and with them focusing on Murdock, he's able to swap the bullets in the execution's guns for blanks to set up an escape.
- After Murdoch's pizza place job gets held up by armed robbers, B.A shows up to buy a pizza, unaware of the situation and the robbers are planning to just let him go home with his pizza, but they see through Murdoch's plea for help via the napkins he wrote messages on and knock them away. However, Murdoch actually wrote the real message on the pizza in anchovies knowing that B.A hates anchovies and would notice something was up, also to prevent him and Hannibal from accidentally eating the message.
- Babylon 5 had one of the more amusing examples of this as Sheridan suckers the entire League of Non-Aligned Worlds into allowing White Stars to patrol their borders and protect them by fueling their paranoia with such acts such as planting a true but very Suspiciously Specific Denial on the Voice of the Resistance broadcast, refusing any explanation for his erratic actions, and letting the League convince themselves that Sheridan was hiding some dire threat, thus making them demand the very thing Sheridan was trying to get them to do.
- Happens a few times on Battle Creek.
- The cops interrogate a brother and sister on how they murdered a woman who could have taken away their fortune, emphasizing they know the pair still have the bloody clothes from the murder somewhere. The two refuse to confess and Milt and Russ find them at their mansion burning the bloody clothes. The two smugly say the cops have no evidence but Milt and Russ grin they have something better: a confession as what other explanation is a jury going to accept as to why two rich people would be burning their clothes in the middle of the day right after talking to the cops about a murder?
- When a young girl is found with a brick of cocaine, the gang realizes it came from her uncle cop, who stole it from a bust. Guz goes to the cop to tell him they know what he did and to turn himself in to help his niece. Convinced she's wearing a wire, the cop refuses to admit it. He then goes to his niece to press her on being quiet about it all...unaware she's wearing a wire.
- When Russ' con artist mother shows up, it's almost impossible to count the number of shuffles going on.
- In Better Call Saul, Jimmy & Kim's climactic scam on Howard takes this form. In order to ruin Howard's credibility, they plan to smear him as a paranoid drug addict. They plant evidence of drug use for Howard's friends to find, and, using a planted fake PI, convince Howard that Jimmy has delivered a large bribe to a person unknown to Howard. When Howard recognizes the arbiter in the Sandpiper case as this person, he immediately accuses him of corruption, only to find that the ironclad evidence his PI had just delivered him has been replaced with complete non-sequiturs. The mickey they slipped him right before dilates his pupils and makes him sweaty and anxious, sealing the deal.
- On The Blacklist, Tom pretends to be a conman who goes to underground casinos and cheats at craps by distracting the casino employees and other players with an elaborate story of how he once went on vacation and found a watch worth thousands of dollars. A rich playboy quickly realizes that the story is bogus, since he knows the area where the story supposedly took place and the story does not fully match reality. The playboy also spots Tom's cheating, but rather than report him to the casino, he befriends Tom. This was Tom's plan all along. He deliberately added flaws to his story that only the mark would spot. The mark has a habit of befriending conmen, and Tom needed a way to get into his confidence quickly. Tom is actually looking for a quick way to get close to some Russian criminals who are blackmailing the mark.
- Black Sails: Flint pulls one early in season 2 to regain his command after Dufresne's mutiny. He approaches Dufresne privately and warns him not to take a popular and quick trade route home, as they are likely to run into merchant vessels and the crew will want to raid them, which, with their numbers depleted from previous battles, they are in no in condition for. However, Dufresne decides that with their newly captured Spanish warship, they have nothing to fear from a merchant vessel, and Flint is merely trying to trick him into avoiding an easy and profitable victory that will win him popularity with the crew and cement him as the new Captain. He takes the trade route, and sure enough, they come across a vessel to plunder. But the battle goes poorly, largely due to Dufresne's lack of experience in command, and humiliates him while allowing Flint the perfect opportunity to step in and play the hero, earning the trust of the crew back. After the crew votes for Flint to return as Captain, Dufresne muses that this was what Flint had intended all along, and wonders whether they would have even considered taking the trade route home in the first place had Flint not advised against it.
- Blake's 7. In "Gold", our heroes take part in The Caper to rob a spaceship shipping gold from the planet Zerok. The gold has been atomically altered to prevent theft, but the inside man claims he has a contact that can convert the gold back to normal. However the Seven discover that Servalan is behind the whole scheme, so the Seven force her to exchange 10 billion in Zerok currency for the useless black gold. Then they discover that Zerok has just joined the Federation — Servalan can now get her gold converted legally, while all Zerok currency has been declared invalid, leaving our heroes with worthless paper.
- The opening of Season 2 of Blood & Treasure has Danny meeting museum curator Julia when thief ex-girlfriend Lexi shows up. Danny notes Lexi has an RF transmitter to shut down the museum security as she takes off running. Julia worries Lexi is after something in the museum vault and leads Danny there, confessing she forged paperwork to take an artifact she knew was stolen. They arrive at the vault with Julia surprised Lexi has already gotten it open. Danny reveals the transmitter he "destroyed" was a fake and he had used the real one to get the museum's security codes and opens the door for the arriving cops. Because they now have probable cause due to the "attempted theft," the cops can search the vault to find the stolen artifacts and arrest Julia, who realizes too late this was all a huge setup to lead Danny to the vault.
- Breaking Bad: Whether intentional or accidental, Walter White uses this strategy fairly often to deflect from his criminal activities; he makes up a story to explain something, but the story is always terrible and gets him called out, at which point he confesses to a lesser crime to throw the suspicion off him. In particular, he's able to get away with buying the car wash (and thus giving the family a way to launder his money) by claiming to have won the funds from illegal gambling.
- In Brooklyn Nine-Nine, Captain Holt and Detective Peralta make a bet that Peralta can't steal Holt's Medal of Valor from his office, where Holt has placed it inside a safe within a locked cabinet. Holt proceeds to catch Peralta out in a series of lame attempts to break into the office and steal the medal using what seem to be feeble disguises and distractions, until he ends up being locked in an interrogation room and handcuffed to a table... whereupon Peralta explains to Holt the real plan; while Peralta was distracting Holt with his increasingly feeble attempts to break into Holt's office, the other detectives in the squad — whom Peralta had bribed with an offer to do their paperwork for them — were subtly breaking through Holt's defences and stealing the medal for him. Since he lost the bet, Holt now has to do all of Peralta's paperwork, which now includes the entire squad's.
- Come Halloween next year, Jake once again makes a bet with Captain Holt, with the challenge this time being that Jake will steal Captain Holt's watch right off of his wrist. Once again Jake convinces the other detectives to help him, as well as conscripting a previously arrested pickpocket to actually steal the watch and replace it with a perfect replica. This time around, however, everyone except Jake (and Charles) is working with Holt, including the pickpocket, and so the plan fails. Holt has apparently been planning his revenge for last year from the moment he sat down to do everyone's paperwork, going so far as to subtly convince Jake that an ordinary watch was somehow his most prized personal possession.
- The fourth Halloween has Holt, Jake, and Amy all competing. The winner is Gina, who went out of their way to fake an injury to remove them from the team they were on and then come back and hide in the background while completing the rest of their plan. They also use Terry as an obvious Red Herring since he's trying to work instead of participate, which makes people think he's pulling his own shuffle. Gina manipulated everyone simply because the winner is the ultimate "detective"-slash-genius which she felt was rude and left her out and made sure everything went as planned.
- And on a much grander scale, the reason Captain Holt agrees to Jake's zany challenges in the first place; Jake is an Insufferable Ditzy Genius who fancies himself a maverick Cowboy Cop, and his ability to work together with others as part of a team is sorely lacking as a result. Every time he attempts one of these grandiose bets, Peralta has to get help from the other detectives, and the exercise ultimately contributes to team building, something Holt has been trying to encourage from the beginning.
- Buffyverse:
- That time Angel pretended to go evil in season 3 of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, to get information out of the current Big Bad.
- All of season 5 of Angel, but by the bad guys. Get the good guys so tangled up trying to deal with Wolfram & Hart that they don't notice they're being corrupted.
- Castle: Castle and Jackson Hunt pull one off in "Hunt" to rescue Alexis: Hunt sends Castle to sneak into the bad guy's compound through the sewers; he's easily caught, and the bad guy stows him with Alexis and calls Hunt (his archnemesis) over Castle's radio, and warns them that he'll shoot both of them if he doesn't come out... all of which Hunt wanted him to do, so he could blow him up through the radio and let Alexis and Castle escape.
- Castle does it himself when he tracks down Jerry "3XK" Tyson, who is holding Beckett, by getting information out of Tyson's former cellmate and using it to find an isolated house Tyson had mentioned which would be ideal for hiding her. Tyson, well aware of Castle's ability to ferret out information, assumed Castle would do something like that and would try to catch him by surprise to rescue Beckett, and so had Beckett in another location with his co-conspirator with a video feed from that location. He successfully ambushed Castle with the intent to force him to watch Beckett being killed before being killed himself. When he makes the call to his partner to tell her he had captured Castle, Castle reveals the truth: he anticipated Tyson would be waiting, would have Beckett somewhere else, and would somehow arrange things to make him witness her death first, so he had walked into the ambush for the sole purpose of getting Tyson to make the call, allowing the police to trace it and identify where Beckett was being held. And to get Tyson in front of a window so Esposito could snipe him.
- Cheers has Harry the Hat, played by Harry Anderson who himself was a magician and con artist expert, who did several cons. The biggest one was "Pick a Con... Any Con", with Reid Shelton as a con man grifting Coach. The episode has a reveal that Harry and the con man had teamed up to con Sam and the regulars. It's turned on its head when it's revealed that it was Harry and Coach who had played an even longer con on the con man.
- In Community the study group's elaborate heist tricks Chang into thinking their plan to rescue the Dean has been ruined by Pierce showing up uninvited in a Paper-Thin Disguise, but actually that was to distract him and his forces so they could get the Dean out while he was chasing their misdirect. Deconstructed in that the simpler plan was working fine and might well have gone off without a hitch had they not deliberately ruined it and alerted Chang, who manages to corner them anyway.
- Reid on Criminal Minds used this tactic to retaliate for a prank Morgan had pulled on him, adding a taunting message to Morgan's iPod in place of his favorite tune. This message ended with Reid's voice screaming in Morgan's ear, but warned him what was coming so he wasn't that surprised. Poo-pooing the lameness of Reid's effort, Morgan gets a call on his smartphone, ID-stamped as coming from Garcia ... but that's Reid screaming in his ear too.
- CSI has the aptly titled episode "Suckers", one of the few cases where there's no murder involved whatsoever. The bad guys set up no less than three fake crimes to distract from the real one (insurance fraud) that they're trying to pull off.
- Doctor Who:
- "The Pandorica Opens": At first, the Doctor thinks that the Pandorica is just a fairy tale... until River Song brings him face to face with it. According to the legend, it contains a horrible evil that couldn't be defeated, only contained... and now it is starting to open. The Doctor is standing by with River, Amy, and a bunch of Roman Legionnaires to combat the monster that is to emerge, and manages to drive off a collection of his greatest enemies with a deliciously-hammy Badass Boast. Unfortunately for him, the enemy retreat was a ruse to lure him into a false sense of security, the legionnaires are a bunch of Autons working with them, and there is no monster in the Pandorica; it was built by them specifically to contain the Doctor. After all, to the collected villains of the show, he is the monster they could never defeat.
- "A Good Man Goes to War": The Doctor dresses as a Headless Monk in order to apparently turn them and the marines against each other. When Colonel Manton calms the situation down by having everyone disarm and having them chant "we are not fools" the Doctor reveals his true plan, warping in his own army and capturing his now defenseless enemies in one fell swoop. Unfortunately for the Doctor, his enemies are also pulling the Kansas City Shuffle in this episode — there is another armed force on its way and it kills off several of his allies, and the baby he's there to rescue is a fake. In fact the whole point of this seems to have been to humiliate him; they knew he would show up, so all the dupes were sacrificed while the people in the actual conspiracy ran off with the baby.
- Dynasty (2017):
- In the second season finale, Fallon tells Blake his plan to frame Michael for bribery and extortion won't work as they already found the bag of money he planted in his apartment. Blake smirks "oh, did you say bag or bags?" Sure enough, the cops find the other bags of cash to arrest Michael.
- Alexis tries to embarrass a drunk Kirby at a party for Adam's bosses. Kirby turns it around to trick her into confessing how Alexis is trying to break her and Adam up. Kirby then hints she did something to the sushi and Alexis goes around, literally smacking trays out of people's hands. She then sees Kirby chewing on the perfectly fine sushi while people wonder if Alexis is drunk.
- Blake's brother Ben threatens to contest the family will that would give him half of the Carrington estate. That includes a subpoena for transcripts that would prove their father changed the will. Blake ignores Fallon's attempts to sneak into the lawyer's office to get them and simply hires a guy to break in and steal them. He gloats to Ben that there's no way he can prove what the transcripts say...and Ben just laughs there was never going to be a subpoena, he just wanted Blake to think there was so he'd do this. Now, Ben can point out how incredibly suspicious the timing is so the judge will deny Blake's motion to dismiss the case due to evidence tampering.
Ben: It's kind of ironic, don't you think? You file a motion citing lack of evidence and then give me the very evidence to move forward. So, thanks. - In one episode of Frasier, the titular psychiatrist gets involved in a prank war with Bulldog, the sports commentator for the radio station where they work. Frasier naturally concocts overly-complicated, psychologically-based schemes, such as creating subconscious pathological fear in Bulldog via a red balloon appearing randomly. Frasier's dad Martin and producer Roz endlessly mock him for his ideas, and decide to team up with Bulldog to scare Frasier with a prank involving zombies. The joke goes off without a hitch, and Frasier is terrified... until one of the actors they hired actually drops dead. Martin and Roz panic, while Frasier grabs a walkie-talkie to call for help... or rather, announce the greatest prank ever. He figured out that Martin and Roz secretly joined forces with Bulldog, and the two created their own alliance to get back at them.
- The Golden Girls episode "The Case of the Libertine Belle" features this. The girls participate in a murder mystery weekend with the staff of Blanche's museum, and Dorothy, who loves crime novels, proves to be quite adept at solving the phony cases. Later, Blanche's boss is found dead in her room, making her the main suspect in an actual crime. Dorothy insists it's just another mock-murder for the guests to figure out, until she puts a mirror under the man's nose and sees that it's not fogging up, which convinces her that he's dead for real. The actual cops are called in, and just as Blanche is about to be taken away, Dorothy notices a flaw in Blanche's rival Posey's testimony and exposes her as the true culprit. The cops put the cuffs on Posey...and then Blanche's boss comes downstairs, revealing that it was all another staged crime. As for the mirror: it turns out that Rose, of all people, secretly sprayed it with defogger (at the request of the mystery club's staff) to make the corpse appear dead. Why? To get back at Blanche for lying about borrowing a pair of her earrings, of course. Beware the Nice Ones indeed.
- Dorothy and Sophia inadvertently create one in another episode. Rose has trouble sleeping, so Sophia offers to make her a "Sicilian sleeping potion." Dorothy figures out the real cause of Rose's insomnia (she's confused caffeine with calcium and has been downing it every night), but Sophia still whips up the potion, and Dorothy takes a sip—then immediately falls over on the bed. Sophia is thrilled, as it was apparently a fake ("I gotta remember what I put in this thing!") and runs out of the room, at which points Dorothy gets up—she was faking. Then, as the episode ends, Dorothy actually keels over, fast asleep. It's not clear if Sophia's comment was part of the con, or if she genuinely didn't know that the potion would work.
- How I Met Your Mother. After Barney goads Lily and Marshall into betting that he can't perform several fancy hibachi cooking tricks (with the right to touch Lily's breasts being his prize if he can), Barney starts dropping hints that the bet is a hustle and he's actually a professionally trained hibachi chef. When Lily freaks out about possibly losing, Barney says that if he can just see her breasts they can call the bet off. However, just before Lily bares her chest, Marshall stops her, having deduced that it's a Kansas City Shuffle: Barney was only acting like he could easily win the bet to trick Lily into exposing herself. Marshall and Lily share a laugh at their own cleverness ... then stare dumbfounded when Barney shows off his hibachi cooking skills for real. Thus actually making it a Xanatos Gambit: no matter what they did, Barney would either see Lily's tracts of land (partial victory), or touch them (complete victory).
- "The Playbook" was an elaborate con to get Lily to think she was sabotaging all of Barney's usual cons to get women, only to have it been a ploy to get her to set him up with one.
- Hustle. All the time. If it's obvious how the scam works ten minutes in, you can bet your life that's just what the mark is supposed to think he's supposed to think.
- Hustle had one involving a roulette table and a Sheriff from The Wild West. The original roulette wheel from the 1800's was mechanised and could be controlled with a sheriff's badge in a slot on the top. Of course the team couldn't let the mark know this, so they went to the trouble of constructing (and auctioning off) a fake table just so that their mark could get it. However it was more of "We have to make him think that we are up to something when we aren't".
- The Jackass guys like to do this to each other; they'll set the victim up to do a stunt or prank skit, only to switch everything on him mid-skit. Here's
an example. - In the show Joy of Life, this happens several times, between several parties/all the chessmasters running about.
- Xiao En is convinced that Chen Pingping withdrawing his protection from Fan Xian's diplomatic party is a trick to get him to kill Fan Xian who he suspects based on hints of information fed to him by Chen Pingping is his grandson, stolen away and brainwashed to be an Overwatch Council agent. It's really a trick to help convince him that Fan Xian is his grandson, thus tricking him into spilling his secret to Fan Xian.
- In Northern Qi, Shen Zhong thinks Fan Xian's plan to loop Northern Qi into an embezzelment scheme with the Qing imperial treasury is an attempt to scam them. It's really an attempt to ruin his favor with the empress by manipulating him into loudly voicing disapproval of a publicly popular venture.
- One episode of Lawrence Leung's Unbelievable is about magic tricks. At the end of the episode, Lawrence invites a magician he consulted earlier to lunch at a Chinese restaurant and promises him he can bamboozle him with the cunning and misdirection he's learnt. He performs a fairly basic card trick that the magician is well familiar with. He sees through straight away, but then looks around to find that they're sitting in what now resembles a Mexican restaurant.
- This is common on Leverage.
- For example, it is the key of the Pilot Episode. After being double-crossed by Dubenich the team want to get back at him but know he'll see them coming. So they set up a business arrangement between him and some Nigerian officials, wich of course sets off some alarm bells. Except, these are real Nigerians, and while he thinks hes seen through their scheme they make it look like he's bribing the nigerian government.Dubenich: I found the transmitter.
Nate: Oh, you found the transmitter with the blinking light. Yeah, we wanted you to figure some of it out. Then we just gave you what you were expecting. - "The Three-Card Monte Job" shows that Nate learned it from his father and the mark of the episode, Jimmy Ford. As a child, Jimmy would keep challenging Nate to find the queen in the titular game in order to teach him this concept. In the present day Jimmy is working with the Russian mob to stage three bank robberies so that while the police are scrambling to respond the robberies, the Russians can retrieve their seized goods from te evidence locker, and Jimmy can retrieve the ledger of the Irish mob he used to work for. Nate pulls one back on him when it turns out that instead of killing him or letting him go free, he called up the mob in advance and told them Jimmy was planning to blackmail them, forcing Jimmy out of town in order to escape the mob now out for his blood.
- "The Boiler Room Job" is one huge Shuffle, though it's called something else (see this link). The team couldn't con the mark, because he knew every con and every con man in the country...so they distracted him with an elaborate Big Store con, knowing he'd see right through it, and forget that Hardison was waiting with a trace on his bank account. They even called it the Moonwalking Bear. The guy can't believe they'd just steal from him and even as he's dragged out by the Feds, is convinced they have to be part of the con.
- "The Gold Job" has Hardison taking the lead on a job and boasting of a brand-new style of con, a ridiculously complex series of moves that basically is just a land deal. However, it falls apart because the marks get tired of jumping through all the convoluted hoops Hardison has set up and just quit. Luckily, Nate has already set up a (far simpler) backup plan to get them. Nate tells Hardison that the problem with such ultra-complex plans is because you can never predict how a mark will react, so Nate always starts with the simple ones and then works his way into slightly more complex if need be. He also schools a geek on the concept of Rage Quit (since Hardison styled his con like a videogame).
- The series finale takes this up to eleven. Sterling finally catches on by the end, but decides to let Nate go and gives him a card saying, "Now we're even. Tell Sophie to drive carefully."
- For example, it is the key of the Pilot Episode. After being double-crossed by Dubenich the team want to get back at him but know he'll see them coming. So they set up a business arrangement between him and some Nigerian officials, wich of course sets off some alarm bells. Except, these are real Nigerians, and while he thinks hes seen through their scheme they make it look like he's bribing the nigerian government.
- Lexx "A Midsummer's Nightmare" is a slight subversion. Actually no con was ever planned (unless Titania planned the whole course of events in advance). But given that the Lexxverse is full of idiots, rather not. The arrogance and paranoia of Oberon made him believe he was being hoodwinked, and the plot unfolded like a straight example of the trope: All three conditions were met, and Oberon married Titania-in-the-body-of-Titania-who-he-thought-was-guaranteedly-not-Titania. A case of royally outgambitting yourself.
- The Lizzie Mcguire episode "Lizzie's Eleven" involved Lizzie recruiting her friends and family to swap out Kate's planned yearbook photo array (which excluded every picture of Lizzie) for the more accurate one (which included eleven pictures of Lizzie, to justify the title drop). Right at the end, Lizzie, running the DJ booth, accidentally announces Kate's movements to the room, alerting her to the plan, and Lizzie's mother (who'd been excluded from the con) steps in to give Kate her photo disk back and chide Lizzie for being silly. Kate walks away smirking at how she bested Lizzie, then it reveals that Lizzie's mom used her Chekhov's Skill at slight-of-hand to swap out the disks, meaning she handed Kate Lizzie's disk. Though it isn't exactly clear why the subterfuge was necessary. As far as the audience could tell, they'd already swapped out the disks without Kate being remotely aware anything was happening. Presumably, if Lizzie hadn't alerted her, she still would have wound up with Lizzie's disk anyway. Meaning it was basically to trick the audience into thinking Lizzie got caught and complete the Shout-Out (or to make her mother feel included since she felt her talent with cards was being wasted).
- Lost:
- In Season Six, a character explains to the surviving castaways that he wants them to leave the Island with him in the Ajira plane, but when the good guys ditch him and lock themselves inside Widmore's submarine in "The Candidate," it looks like they've outsmarted him...that is, until he grins and says to survivor Claire, "You don't want to be anywhere on that sub." 'Cause the Magnificent Bastard snuck a bomb onboard. Cue the cruelest twenty minutes of the show's history, as Sayid, Jin, and Sun all perish, Lapidus is left for dead, and the four survivors barely escape and are left to sob on a beach at night. Then there is the second layer to that con. He cannot kill the castaways himself so he lets them think that he conned them into locking themselves in the submarine with a bomb. They discover the bomb before the timer runs down so they figure that they can just disarm the bomb to neutralize the trap. However, 'disarming' the bomb actually arms it so the castaways are causing their own deaths which is the Loophole Abuse he needed. Ironically Jack figured it out ahead of time but the experienced conman Sawyer insisted on pulling the wires on the bomb.
- In the season two episode "The Long Con", Sawyer plays this straight as can be in his flashback, making a woman think she has caught him trying to con her while that is actually the setup for a much longer and more profitable con.
- In Mad Men, Don Draper executes a magnificent one against his self-proclaimed rival Ted Chaough in "The Chrysanthemum and the Sword". During the competition over the Honda Motorcycles account, the Honda execs make certain rules to ensure a level playing field: each agency is given $3000 to make boards and copy—no finished work allowed. After Roger Sterling makes a point of displaying what he thinks of the Japanese (not very much) to the visiting Honda executives, Don decides that by way of damage control, he needs to make sure Chaough doesn't use this to sail to victory. Don thus goes to great lengths to hint that SCDP is going to make a big, expensive spec commercial for Honda (which is finished work and therefore not allowed) convincing Chaough that his firm should do the same. But SCDP isn't making a commercial at all (leading to a pretty hilarious scene with Peggy riding around an empty set on a Honda motorcycle◊) Draper's intention was to severely damage Chaough's firm's budget by fooling them into making the big, expensive commercial. Don resigns the Honda account, returning the $3000, on the grounds that Honda had broken its own rules and he could not honorably do business with them. Chaough's firm is now a mess, and while Honda doesn't end up giving anyone their main motorcycle account, SCDP gets a shot at the advertising for their new automotive division.
- In M*A*S*H, BJ convinces Hawkeye that he's pranking everyone in the camp, and is saving the best one for Hawkeye. He puts a snake in Charles' bed, puts shaving cream in Colonel Potter's toothpaste, cuts the back off of Margret's bathrobe, poisons Father Mulcahy and sets off a bomb in Klinger's filing cabinet, each one making Hawkeye increasingly paranoid. After the last two, he sets up a cot outside in a barb-wire enclosure, resulting in him getting no sleep from all the background noise. At the end everyone reveals they were in on it and either did everything themselves or simply lied to Hawkeye, and that Hawkeye was the actual victim.
- Mission: Impossible does this in a number of episodes.
- The Mind of Stefan Miklos had the IMF team fooling a brilliant intelligence officer with a photographic memory, from whom it would be impossible to hide the fact that they were scamming him; the scam they actually pulled was very carefully staged so that he would draw the wrong conclusions about what he saw and what they wanted him to believe.
- In another case, they conned the warden and second-in-command of a prison with an escape-proof cell into believing that a political prisoner in the cell had been switched with a double during the distraction caused by another pair of prisoners attempting escape (when, in fact, the prisoner never left his cell). The "double" and the two "escapees" are then taken away for interrogation by some helpful state security agents who "coincidentally" happened to be present.
- On Modern Family, Jay, Gloria and Cam are an "Alliance" to try to get the Pritchetts on board with their plans. Each of them sabotages various efforts of their spouses and, in retaliation, they're cut out of the plans to vote on a family trip to Italy. At which point, the Alliance smirk at the camera on how they've been secretly manipulating their spouses with subtle hints to pick Italy for a trip.
- Money Heist: The entire heist at the Royal Mint of Spain is a series of these. The Professor knows that the Spanish National Police are not all incompetent, so he feeds them information in drips and directs their investigation towards dead ends and red herrings. He starts out by making the cops think that the robbers taking everyone in the Mint hostage was incidental because it forces them into a certain protocol and makes them waste a day. He specifically designed parts of his plan to fail because it makes the cops think that they can win without having to storm the building. This all culminates in the final escape plan: Moscow orders some of the hostages to dig a hole to a nearby tunnel the robbers know will be detected by the police, while he secretly digs a different hole in the vault that leads to another tunnel the police isn't aware of.
- This has happened more than once on Monk, where other crimes or happenings are being perpetrated to distract the police from the real problem. In "Mr. Monk and the Really, Really Dead Guy", Monk is forced to work with FBI agents who are investigating the possible start of a serial killer, who has killed one man with six different methods and threatened to do so again in 36 hours. After Monk gets over his feelings of inadequacy over not being tech-savvy (not helped by the FBI agents being arrogant jerks), Monk reasons out in fairly short order that the "Six-Way Killer" murder was a distraction from the original murder he had been investigating at the start of the episode, and that he was forced by the FBI agents to ignore because they thought the second one was more important. Turns out, the original murder victim had been killed by her date after he tried to rape her, and he needed to keep the police occupied for 36 hours so the special dessert they had ordered would deteriorate in her system and be useless as evidence to implicate him. He committed the Six-Way murder to start the serial killer scare necessary to distract the police. How did Monk figure this out? Because he was bothered by the fact that the Six-Way Killer had set such an arbitrary time limit instead of 24 hours or naming a specific date and time.
- In The Office (US), Dwight plants an obvious bug in Jim's office in the form of a huge wooden duck (er, mallard). Jim quickly finds it and has some fun at Dwight's expense, eventually telling Dwight to stop trying these tricks. In the tag, however, we find out that Dwight actually planted a second, much less conspicuous bug (in the form of a pen) and that the duck (mallard) was just a decoy.
- Only Fools and Horses had Granddad tell a story similar to the joke example above. He used to work as a security guard for a fancy company, and there was one suspicious employee who would always leave the building with a fancy briefcase. For an entire year, Granddad would check his briefcase, only to find nothing in there. When the employee quit the company, it turned out over three-hundred and sixty-five fancy briefcases had gone missing.
- Penn & Teller:
- The Red Ball Trick. Penn tells you beforehand how the trick is done (with a thread) and then storms offstage. Then for three and a half minutes you watch Teller and a red ball while you try in vain to spot the thread. Most people conclude that it's a "sucker" trick (see above), i.e. that there's actually no thread and the ball is controlled in some other way. The fact is that Teller is just that good; he's rehearsed it so much that even when you know the gimmick you can't see him doing it. Some other magicians have said that the trick is even more impressive to them, since they know how he's doing it and still can't catch him at it.
- At Penn and Teller's Las Vegas stage show, they will often remind you that the tricks they're doing aren't necessarily the tricks you think they're doing. This still doesn't stop you from being caught out, though.
- Some of the magicians performing on Penn & Teller: Fool Us attempt this by developing a new technique for a well-known illusion, but then performing it in a way that deliberately makes it look like they are using one (or more) of the well-known techniques, rather than the new technique. When Penn starts describing the well-known techniques, they can honestly say that they did not use those techniques to perform the illusion.
- In one episode there's a sword swallower who, well, swallows a sword (first a straight one, then a curvy one). In perhaps a reverse case of the trope, he didn't win. He was very good but Penn, who had done a sword swallowing act himself in the past, explained that while he was extremely impressed by the guy's technique, it wasn't a "trick" because he actually did everything he said he was doing and there was no illusion or sleight-of-hand involved at all.
- Lightly done in Phoenix Nights, in which club owner Brian Potter seemingly backs a team he picks himself, to enter in a pub quiz for a year's supply of lager. His rival then sabotages them so they lose, however Brian has selected another team to win, behind his rival's back. Of course, this backfires when it's non-alcoholic lager...
- A pulls one on Pretty Little Liars. The girls go to a magic show and deduce that the mime running the show is A and Aria agrees to be part of the show, but what A wanted was to distract the girls, so they could kidnap Emily while the other two were focused on the show, while the mime was just a magician.
- This becomes the main plot in the Cult Classic mini-series Profit. Jack, a fellow employee and Profit's boss and Joanne, a private investigator Jack had an affair with, figure out early that Jim Profit isn't who he claims to be and might be very dangerous. However, instead of trying to prove to them that he is innocent, Jim Profit plays on their suspicions by making himself look like the monster they think he is so they won't discover his real plan until its too late. It works and it results in Profit getting everything he wants in the end.
- In Season 6 of Riverdale, the evil Percival has a plan to use a "ghost train" and a coming comet to gain power to cause mass destruction. Part of that seems to involve trying to tear down Pops' diner, which the gang theorizes is because it's need for a fated battle. They thus arrange to move the diner a bit over so it's still intact. When meeting Mr. Cypher, Tabitha brags about the gang beating Percival's plan. Cypher just laughs that the diner was never what mattered, it's the land it's on. It's actually a Hellmouth and special places like churches or, say, a diner, were built to "cap" the power they held. By moving the diner, all that evil energy has been "uncorked" in time for the comet and too late the gang realize they played right into Percival's hands.
- The first season finale of Sneaky Pete has Marius pulling off a brilliant one on crime boss Vince. He organizes a big poker game with a known Indian tech millionaire. Vince becomes convinced the guy is a ringer and the game is rigged and calls Marius on it with guns pointed. The millionaire's bodyguard pulls out his phone and announces the man is a protected informant, he's an FBI agent and has just called reinforcements. Vince openly laughs on how "this guy is dedicated to the act" and shoots him in the chest. At which point, the man reveals he has a Bulletproof Vest on as he shoots Vince. As he falls, Vince hears police sirens and then agents pouring in. Too late, Vince realizes he just shot an actual federal agent which means a minimum of 20 years in prison.
- Marius' brother is thrown as he thought the guy was a fake too. Marius tells him that the millionaire was totally for real but he knew Vince would be expecting a con. And as it happens, his team took advantage of the chaos of the raid to rob Vince's safe of millions while he heads to jail.
- The season 2 finale has Marius pulling off the heist of a buffalo statue supposedly containing $11 million stolen years ago by Maggie. Complicating things are a pair of FBI agents threatening his gang unless they help take down the vicious mobster who wants his money back. It turns out the money is not inside...which Marius had already figured out but uses the confusion to take out the mobster himself while his crew locate the boxes containing the real money from a storage facility. Then, the FBI agents are revealed to be con artists themselves as Marius was using them as cover to make the mobster think he was under coercion. But when going over the money, Marius discovers that instead of hundred dollar bills, the cash in the boxes are merely $1. He calls up Maggie who reveals she knew all along the "agents" weren't real and was using Marius to get the money...which she destroys as revenge for the mobster killing her lover. Marius' gang isn't happy that this shuffle turns what should have been a huge score into a mere pittance.
- In the final episode of the fourth series of Spooks, Rogue Agent Angela Wells infiltrates Section D and holds the team hostage in order to find evidence that the Security Services killed Princess Diana. After the situation's been resolved, Ruth discovers that documents relating to security at Buckingham Palace are missing and deduces that Wells intends to attack the Royal Family. Because of this, the Royals are evacuated to their secure bunker, Pegasus — which an associate of Wells has secretly planted a bomb inside, meaning the evacuation was playing right into her hands.
- Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: ex-spymaster Garak pulls off a classic in the episode "In the Pale Moonlight".
- The Federation is failing in their war with The Dominion, so Sisko has Garak make a fake recording of the Dominion planning a surprise attack on the neutral Romulans, and then invites a prominent Romulan Senator on a diplomatic mission in Dominion space to secretly visit Deep Space Nine and see the forgery. The senator correctly realizes that "It's a fake!!!" and departs to expose the fraud. However, on route the Senator's ship explodes. Garak suspected the fake wouldn't hold up to scrutiny, and planted a bomb on the politician's ship. When the recording is found by Romulan salvage teams, its imperfections are presumed to be damage from the explosion. Further, the Romulans conclude that the Senator was killed by the Dominion to prevent the leak, as no one else knew he visited DS9. The Romulans promptly join the war against the Dominion.
- Doubles as a Batman Gambit, as Garak's plan is based on the Romulans assuming the Dominion would kill someone to prevent a leak, as the Romulans would readily do the same, and the Federation themselves are too goody-two-shoes to be involved in an assassination of a person they'd invited into their space (unlike Garak himself).Garak: And the more the Dominion protests its innocence, the more the Romulans will believe they're guilty, because it's exactly what the Romulans would have done in their place!
- In a more minor case, in "Sacrifice of Angels", Quark and Ziyal go to the jail cells to supposedly deliver a hasperat souffle to a set of prisoners. The guard suspects a Jail Bake and begins examining it closely — giving Ziyal a chance to slip in behind him unnoticed and inject him with a hypospray, knocking him out.
- Star Trek: Picard season 3 is this trope writ large. Namely that a rogue group of Changelings have stolen a portal device from the Daystrom Institute and are once again hiding within Starfleet. Picard and Riker is drawn into this as these Changelings are also after Dr. Beverly Crusher and her second (and Picard's first) son Jack. At the same time, Raffi and Worf are investigating the theft and end up teaming up with Picard and the others, going on to investigate Daystrom. There, they discover that the theft of the device was a cover for something else - the theft of Picard's original organic body. It isn't until they get to Earth (and having recruited Seven of Nine, Troi, Geordi, his daughters, and a resurrected Data in the process) that they find out that even the hiding in Starfleet is part of the con - they've been altering transporters to include part of Picard's DNA into everyone who uses them, namely that his DNA has been altered by the Borg and Jack is basically Locutus 2.0. When the Borg Queen gets a hold of Jack, she's able to take a hold of both the ships and the young crew members who are susceptible to control.
- {{TL;DR}}: The Changelings steal a portal device to hide a massive plot for the Borg to assimilate Starfleet and their various ship's crew.
- In the Star Trek: Voyager episode "Think Tank", the titular consortium offers to find a solution to Voyager's conflict with the Hazari in exchange for Seven of Nine joining them. It turns out they'd actually been playing Voyager and the Hazari against each other to that end. The crew are able to get the Hazari on side after learning this, but they know the Think Tank won't give up trying to acquire Seven, so they have the Hazari stage an attack on Voyager as a pretext for Seven to enter the Think Tank's ship. The Think Tank's representative Kurros figures out that the Hazari's "attack" is a ruse and accesses Seven's implants in order to learn what she plans to do. It turns out Kurros was supposed to see through the first layer of deception, while the real deception was making him think it was it was prudent to establish a link to Seven. Voyager sends a signal through her, severing the telepathic link between the Think Tank's members and bringing its ship out of subspace, leaving it vunerable to the Hazari.
- In the Stargate Atlantis episode "The Return (Part 2)", the team reveal their plan to sabotage Atlantis to explode to the currently-captured General O'Neill and Richard Woolsey while trying to save them from the Asuran Replicators. However, the Asurans mind probe both of their prisoners and discover the plan in time to undo the sabotage... only to learn the lethal way that this was a cover for the actual plan, which involved rigging the shield generators to generate an anti-Replicator pulse that would wipe out all Asurans in the city as soon as they activated the shield. The team figured the Asurans would mind probe their captives, and deliberately fed them a false plan which the Asurans could stop without noticing the real one.
- In Terriers, it appears that the bad guys are trying to hush up a toxicology report on a land development site. Private eye Hank manages to leak it and the site is shut down. Hank celebrates the win...only for his schizophrenic sister Steph to matter-of-factly state the report is a fake as it's not possible for toxins to mix together in that huge numbers naturally unless they were somehow planted there. Hank realizes they wanted that site somehow shut down as a distraction to a much bigger plan.
- The Unusuals, in the episode "The Dentist", features a couple of con artists stealing evidence from the precinct. They make a big production of making off with a backpack, indicating that the evidence was in it when they made their getaway. Turns out, the money didn't leave the precinct when they did. They boxed it up and left it with the outgoing mail.
- Veronica Mars: Veronica once pulled this kind of trick on sleazy private detective Vinnie Van Lowe, giving him a bugged pen that he immediately identified and mocked her for—but he didn't realize that the pin she'd given to his secretary was also a bug.
- In an episode of V.I.P., Val and the crew get away from an apartment that the villains are staking out by making them think they've sent decoys for them to follow. In fact they've escaped already by disguising themselves with variations of their own clothing and hairstyles while the oblivious villains ignore them and continue to stake out the now empty apartment.
- The Walking Dead: The main cast is in their RV on a desperate mission to get the ailing Maggie to Hilltop Colony for medical aid (their own medic has recently been slain, and Hilltop's medic is an obstetrician and thus the only one who can treat her anyway). En-route they're confronted by the villainous Saviors, who demand they surrender themselves. The group backs up and tries another route to Hilltop, only to find a larger group of Saviors waiting for them. Several more attempts fail as the group is harassed by progressively larger groups of enemies. As night is falling, Eugene posits that the Saviors don't know how many people are actually in their RV, and suggests that while the others take Maggie to Hilltop on foot, he will drive the RV to distract the Saviors. The others flee into the woods, only for them to end up captured less than an hour later, as this was exactly what the Saviors were hoping for. The group runs right into about a hundred assembled Saviors and see Eugene has already been captured as well. They're forced to their knees and ordered to submit to Negan, who follows up by killing two of their group and torturing them into submission.
