Backlight (2002) | StreamScapeX

Episodes

Season 25, 17 episodes

Episode 1: The Silent Economic Crisis
- Now playing
- 23m
- Oct 8, 2025
According to former London banker and math genius Gary Stevenson, we are in the middle of a major economic crisis — but not one marked by a sudden shock like a stock market crash. He believes an economic crisis can look like house prices that just keep rising.
Episode 2: China’s major charm offensive
- 23m
- Oct 16, 2025
Together with political scientist Maria Repnikova, we dive into the world of soft power. In her book *Chinese Soft Power*, she explores how China no longer seeks to persuade the world through force, but through attraction — power that bubbles up from below rather than being imposed from the top down. Soft power is often associated with tender-hearted leaders gently stroking their subjects with a velvet glove. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Episode 3: Apartheid as a business model
- 19m
- Oct 22, 2025
According to author and investigative journalist Antony Loewenstein, Big Tech and governments will increasingly join forces to control — and ultimately oppress — populations. He argues that all of Palestine has effectively become a laboratory for the surveillance industry. The notion that every Palestinian poses a threat has become so mainstream that everyone must be monitored. To keep that system running, Israel has for years received assistance from Big Tech, including one of the world’s fastest-growing tech companies: Palantir — named after a seeing stone with prophetic powers from *The Lord of the Rings*.
Episode 4: When will the AI bubble burst?
- 21m
- Nov 6, 2025
The AI industry is a growing bubble. Investments in companies building AI applications are hot — very hot. The question is where we are on the wave right now. Is it nearing its peak, with the AI bubble about to burst, or are we still far from that point? From Shanghai, Chinese economist Andy Xie analyzes and comments on the relationship between the American and Chinese financial markets for outlets such as *Bloomberg* and the *South China Morning Post*. His analyses are often seen as contrarian and provocative. “America’s idea of winning is to create a God. That God will live in San Francisco. And the God works for America,” says Xie.
Episode 5: From wrestling hero to autocrat
- 22m
- Nov 19, 2025
From wrestling character to president of the White House: Trump owes his rise, according to journalist and writer Josephine Riesman, to his experience of show wrestling. She examines the close bond between Trump and the professional wrestling industry. From an early age, Trump has been a fan of professional wrestling: an entertainment sport where everything is about dragging the audience through spectacle and deceit. For Trump, this tactic has become the basis of his political approach.
Episode 6: Fascism is back
- 15m
- Nov 24, 2025
For the bystander perhaps a remarkable move: Elon Musk who is encouraging the radical right-wing German party AfD. For Timothy Snyder, as a professor of history specializing in Holocaust and Eastern Europe, anything but surprising. Snyder delves into the train of thought of oligarchs, who increasingly know how to find each other on the world stage.
Episode 7: The enshittification of the internet
- 21m
- Nov 26, 2025
American activist and writer Cory Doctorow on why the big American tech companies can criticize their products with impunity and we continue to use them anyway. The endless stream of ads nowadays on Google, Instagram and YouTube not only creates frustration, but also genuine concerns. Doctorow coined the term Enshitfification for what goes wrong with the internet and made a thorough analysis of how that could have happened. Because the classic idea, that if a product or service is no longer good, the free market automatically switches to better alternatives, no longer applies in the digital economy.
Episode 8: The murder of capitalism
- 19m
- Dec 1, 2025
Capitalism has not only been broken, but also replaced by something much worse, according to economist and former finance minister in Greece, Yanis Varoufakis. He has been studying the developments of the market for years and argues that capitalism is on its last legs and has been overtaken by something new. In his book Technofeudalism: What capitalism killed, he calls the new system technofeodalism. A traditional capitalist gave 85 percent of the profits to the employees. At a company like Meta, employees only get one percent.
Episode 9: Away with the super rich
- 18m
- Dec 5, 2025
Ingrid Robeyns (1972) is an economist and philosopher and professor of Ethics of Institutions at Utrecht University. She is the founder of limitarism. According to Robeyns, we need to move towards a system in which the strongest shoulders actually carry the heaviest burdens and inequalities are curtailed. The excess money of the super-rich can bring a lot of good to people and society. And in the end, everyone benefits from that, including the super-rich themselves.
Episode 10: Get rid of the diploma arrogance
- 19m
- Dec 8, 2025
Not class but merit will determine everyone's position in life. Away with the aristocracy, live the meritocracy, where everyone would have equal opportunities at the start, and those who deserve it all would end up as winners. But according to scientist and political philosopher Michael Sandel, meritocracy is a plausible cause of rising fascism. Because implicitly it means: if you have a hard time and do not obtain a diploma, then that must be your own fault. For many people, this led to resentment and anger.
Episode 11: Consultant in power
- 18m
- Dec 10, 2025
and talk to Mariana Mazzucato about her book The Big Con, about how consultants are weakening our companies, hollowing out our governments and harming our economies. Young talent prefers a consultant job massively over working for the government. As a result, there is little to no knowledge with governments. The consultancy industry is cleverly immersed in that gap, not only issuing advice, but also implementing policy. Large consultancies give the impression that they offer objective expertise, but their goal is mainly to make the government dependent for as long as possible.
Episode 12: Why reality does not exist
- 19m
- Dec 15, 2025
Carlo Rovelli is theoretically physicist and quantum mechanics is his great love. He argues that the reality does not exist, because the reality we experience arises mainly from the interaction we have with it. We create our reality ourselves, and when we come to see that individual, indivisible parts do not exist and everything around us only takes on meaning through the relationships with other things and events, we also see ourselves differently. That insight prompted Rovelli to become political activism, because our thinking and action is changing the world. He is called the poet of physics.
Episode 13: Does satire still have a future
- 24m
- Dec 19, 2025
Democracy is under pressure and in the post-truth era, truth has given way to spectacle. How can we, now that reality seems more absurd than ever, best question power? Does this increasingly absurd reality call for a different way of resisting? We follow an action by The Yes Men, American art collective that uses identity theft to question politics. And a meeting with the German art collective Das Zentrum für Politische Schönheit that draws attention to the rise of AfD, and how.
Episode 14: The dark site of the energy transition
- 26m
- Dec 22, 2025
French journalist Guillaume Pitron warns of the shadow side of the energy transition and digitization. Rare metals are essential for the production of electric vehicles, fighter jets, wind turbines and solar panels, as well as for our smartphones, computers, tablets and other everyday devices. But most people actually know very little about the way they are extracted, or about the ecological and geopolitical cost of this. Pitron wrote the book The Rare Metals War: The Dark Side of Clean Energy and Digital Technologies.
Episode 15: Are we alone in the universe?
- 28m
- Dec 24, 2025
Astronomer Casper Farret Jentink works deep in the forests above Geneva on one of the biggest questions humanity has ever asked itself: are we alone in the universe? We are born alone, we die alone, and in between we try to understand what it means to be there at all. In a workshop, half-observatory, half science fiction decor, astronomer Casper Farret Jentink builds instruments with Swiss precision that can accurately measure light from distant stars to five silicon atoms, in search of a second Earth.
Episode 16: The new perspective on our evolution
- 25m
- Dec 26, 2025
How did complex life on Earth come about? Thanks to scientists like bioinformist Berend Snel, we know that a unique event has occurred on our planet billions of years ago.
Episode 17: Drones that think
- 22m
- Dec 31, 2025
The moment when humanity is on the verge of creating something that can think, learn, feel, or even desire to survive—perhaps at our expense—sometimes seems closer than ever. Can we predict the future to protect ourselves? Or are we in the process of creating something that will surpass our own understanding? Cognitive scientist Marie Safar Postma tries to understand our consciousness by designing and building systems that not only perceive but also anticipate and learn.

Backlight

2002 to present
25 seasons
50m per episode
Documentary

7.4TMDB(7)

Overview

Tegenlicht in Dutch or Backlight in English is a series of television documentaries by the VPRO, a Dutch public broadcasting organisation. Backlight "aims to grasp the quintessence of prominent trends and developments" in the practice of critical journalism, and tries to improve understanding of the intricate inner workings of our modern society.

Fun facts

Episodes
25 seasons and 617 episodes so far
Source for Episodes, opens in a new tab
Cinematography
Cinematography by Adri Schrover, Niels van Koevorden and Wiro Felix
Source for Cinematography, opens in a new tab

Details

Created by: Doke Romeijn
Marije Meerman
Status: Returning Series
Seasons: 25
Episodes: 617
Original title: Tegenlicht
First aired: September 8, 2002
Last aired: December 31, 2025
Original language: Dutch
Countries: Netherlands

Network

Production

Cast

Videos

Episodes

Season 25, 17 episodes

Episode 1: The Silent Economic Crisis
- Now playing
- 23m
- Oct 8, 2025
According to former London banker and math genius Gary Stevenson, we are in the middle of a major economic crisis — but not one marked by a sudden shock like a stock market crash. He believes an economic crisis can look like house prices that just keep rising.
Episode 2: China’s major charm offensive
- 23m
- Oct 16, 2025
Together with political scientist Maria Repnikova, we dive into the world of soft power. In her book *Chinese Soft Power*, she explores how China no longer seeks to persuade the world through force, but through attraction — power that bubbles up from below rather than being imposed from the top down. Soft power is often associated with tender-hearted leaders gently stroking their subjects with a velvet glove. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Episode 3: Apartheid as a business model
- 19m
- Oct 22, 2025
According to author and investigative journalist Antony Loewenstein, Big Tech and governments will increasingly join forces to control — and ultimately oppress — populations. He argues that all of Palestine has effectively become a laboratory for the surveillance industry. The notion that every Palestinian poses a threat has become so mainstream that everyone must be monitored. To keep that system running, Israel has for years received assistance from Big Tech, including one of the world’s fastest-growing tech companies: Palantir — named after a seeing stone with prophetic powers from *The Lord of the Rings*.
Episode 4: When will the AI bubble burst?
- 21m
- Nov 6, 2025
The AI industry is a growing bubble. Investments in companies building AI applications are hot — very hot. The question is where we are on the wave right now. Is it nearing its peak, with the AI bubble about to burst, or are we still far from that point? From Shanghai, Chinese economist Andy Xie analyzes and comments on the relationship between the American and Chinese financial markets for outlets such as *Bloomberg* and the *South China Morning Post*. His analyses are often seen as contrarian and provocative. “America’s idea of winning is to create a God. That God will live in San Francisco. And the God works for America,” says Xie.
Episode 5: From wrestling hero to autocrat
- 22m
- Nov 19, 2025
From wrestling character to president of the White House: Trump owes his rise, according to journalist and writer Josephine Riesman, to his experience of show wrestling. She examines the close bond between Trump and the professional wrestling industry. From an early age, Trump has been a fan of professional wrestling: an entertainment sport where everything is about dragging the audience through spectacle and deceit. For Trump, this tactic has become the basis of his political approach.
Episode 6: Fascism is back
- 15m
- Nov 24, 2025
For the bystander perhaps a remarkable move: Elon Musk who is encouraging the radical right-wing German party AfD. For Timothy Snyder, as a professor of history specializing in Holocaust and Eastern Europe, anything but surprising. Snyder delves into the train of thought of oligarchs, who increasingly know how to find each other on the world stage.
Episode 7: The enshittification of the internet
- 21m
- Nov 26, 2025
American activist and writer Cory Doctorow on why the big American tech companies can criticize their products with impunity and we continue to use them anyway. The endless stream of ads nowadays on Google, Instagram and YouTube not only creates frustration, but also genuine concerns. Doctorow coined the term Enshitfification for what goes wrong with the internet and made a thorough analysis of how that could have happened. Because the classic idea, that if a product or service is no longer good, the free market automatically switches to better alternatives, no longer applies in the digital economy.
Episode 8: The murder of capitalism
- 19m
- Dec 1, 2025
Capitalism has not only been broken, but also replaced by something much worse, according to economist and former finance minister in Greece, Yanis Varoufakis. He has been studying the developments of the market for years and argues that capitalism is on its last legs and has been overtaken by something new. In his book Technofeudalism: What capitalism killed, he calls the new system technofeodalism. A traditional capitalist gave 85 percent of the profits to the employees. At a company like Meta, employees only get one percent.
Episode 9: Away with the super rich
- 18m
- Dec 5, 2025
Ingrid Robeyns (1972) is an economist and philosopher and professor of Ethics of Institutions at Utrecht University. She is the founder of limitarism. According to Robeyns, we need to move towards a system in which the strongest shoulders actually carry the heaviest burdens and inequalities are curtailed. The excess money of the super-rich can bring a lot of good to people and society. And in the end, everyone benefits from that, including the super-rich themselves.
Episode 10: Get rid of the diploma arrogance
- 19m
- Dec 8, 2025
Not class but merit will determine everyone's position in life. Away with the aristocracy, live the meritocracy, where everyone would have equal opportunities at the start, and those who deserve it all would end up as winners. But according to scientist and political philosopher Michael Sandel, meritocracy is a plausible cause of rising fascism. Because implicitly it means: if you have a hard time and do not obtain a diploma, then that must be your own fault. For many people, this led to resentment and anger.
Episode 11: Consultant in power
- 18m
- Dec 10, 2025
and talk to Mariana Mazzucato about her book The Big Con, about how consultants are weakening our companies, hollowing out our governments and harming our economies. Young talent prefers a consultant job massively over working for the government. As a result, there is little to no knowledge with governments. The consultancy industry is cleverly immersed in that gap, not only issuing advice, but also implementing policy. Large consultancies give the impression that they offer objective expertise, but their goal is mainly to make the government dependent for as long as possible.
Episode 12: Why reality does not exist
- 19m
- Dec 15, 2025
Carlo Rovelli is theoretically physicist and quantum mechanics is his great love. He argues that the reality does not exist, because the reality we experience arises mainly from the interaction we have with it. We create our reality ourselves, and when we come to see that individual, indivisible parts do not exist and everything around us only takes on meaning through the relationships with other things and events, we also see ourselves differently. That insight prompted Rovelli to become political activism, because our thinking and action is changing the world. He is called the poet of physics.
Episode 13: Does satire still have a future
- 24m
- Dec 19, 2025
Democracy is under pressure and in the post-truth era, truth has given way to spectacle. How can we, now that reality seems more absurd than ever, best question power? Does this increasingly absurd reality call for a different way of resisting? We follow an action by The Yes Men, American art collective that uses identity theft to question politics. And a meeting with the German art collective Das Zentrum für Politische Schönheit that draws attention to the rise of AfD, and how.
Episode 14: The dark site of the energy transition
- 26m
- Dec 22, 2025
French journalist Guillaume Pitron warns of the shadow side of the energy transition and digitization. Rare metals are essential for the production of electric vehicles, fighter jets, wind turbines and solar panels, as well as for our smartphones, computers, tablets and other everyday devices. But most people actually know very little about the way they are extracted, or about the ecological and geopolitical cost of this. Pitron wrote the book The Rare Metals War: The Dark Side of Clean Energy and Digital Technologies.
Episode 15: Are we alone in the universe?
- 28m
- Dec 24, 2025
Astronomer Casper Farret Jentink works deep in the forests above Geneva on one of the biggest questions humanity has ever asked itself: are we alone in the universe? We are born alone, we die alone, and in between we try to understand what it means to be there at all. In a workshop, half-observatory, half science fiction decor, astronomer Casper Farret Jentink builds instruments with Swiss precision that can accurately measure light from distant stars to five silicon atoms, in search of a second Earth.
Episode 16: The new perspective on our evolution
- 25m
- Dec 26, 2025
How did complex life on Earth come about? Thanks to scientists like bioinformist Berend Snel, we know that a unique event has occurred on our planet billions of years ago.
Episode 17: Drones that think
- 22m
- Dec 31, 2025
The moment when humanity is on the verge of creating something that can think, learn, feel, or even desire to survive—perhaps at our expense—sometimes seems closer than ever. Can we predict the future to protect ourselves? Or are we in the process of creating something that will surpass our own understanding? Cognitive scientist Marie Safar Postma tries to understand our consciousness by designing and building systems that not only perceive but also anticipate and learn.

Episodes

E1 Episode 1: The Silent Economic Crisis

E2 Episode 2: China’s major charm offensive

E3 Episode 3: Apartheid as a business model

E4 Episode 4: When will the AI bubble burst?

E5 Episode 5: From wrestling hero to autocrat

E6 Episode 6: Fascism is back

E7 Episode 7: The enshittification of the internet

E8 Episode 8: The murder of capitalism

E9 Episode 9: Away with the super rich

E10 Episode 10: Get rid of the diploma arrogance

E11 Episode 11: Consultant in power

E12 Episode 12: Why reality does not exist

E13 Episode 13: Does satire still have a future

E14 Episode 14: The dark site of the energy transition

E15 Episode 15: Are we alone in the universe?

E16 Episode 16: The new perspective on our evolution

E17 Episode 17: Drones that think

Overview

Fun facts

Details

Network

Production

Cast

Videos

More like this

Episodes

E1 Episode 1: The Silent Economic Crisis

E2 Episode 2: China’s major charm offensive

E3 Episode 3: Apartheid as a business model

E4 Episode 4: When will the AI bubble burst?

E5 Episode 5: From wrestling hero to autocrat

E6 Episode 6: Fascism is back

E7 Episode 7: The enshittification of the internet

E8 Episode 8: The murder of capitalism

E9 Episode 9: Away with the super rich

E10 Episode 10: Get rid of the diploma arrogance

E11 Episode 11: Consultant in power

E12 Episode 12: Why reality does not exist

E13 Episode 13: Does satire still have a future

E14 Episode 14: The dark site of the energy transition

E15 Episode 15: Are we alone in the universe?

E16 Episode 16: The new perspective on our evolution

E17 Episode 17: Drones that think

Fun facts

Episode 1: The Silent Economic Crisis

Episode 2: China’s major charm offensive

Episode 3: Apartheid as a business model

Episode 4: When will the AI bubble burst?

Episode 5: From wrestling hero to autocrat

Episode 6: Fascism is back

Episode 7: The enshittification of the internet

Episode 8: The murder of capitalism

Episode 9: Away with the super rich

Episode 10: Get rid of the diploma arrogance

Episode 11: Consultant in power

Episode 12: Why reality does not exist

Episode 13: Does satire still have a future

Episode 14: The dark site of the energy transition

Episode 15: Are we alone in the universe?

Episode 16: The new perspective on our evolution

Episode 17: Drones that think

Episode 1: The Silent Economic Crisis

Episode 2: China’s major charm offensive

Episode 3: Apartheid as a business model

Episode 4: When will the AI bubble burst?

Episode 5: From wrestling hero to autocrat

Episode 6: Fascism is back

Episode 7: The enshittification of the internet

Episode 8: The murder of capitalism

Episode 9: Away with the super rich

Episode 10: Get rid of the diploma arrogance

Episode 11: Consultant in power

Episode 12: Why reality does not exist

Episode 13: Does satire still have a future

Episode 14: The dark site of the energy transition

Episode 15: Are we alone in the universe?

Episode 16: The new perspective on our evolution

Episode 17: Drones that think