Johan Derksen watched the program in which Antoinnette Scheulderman honors celebrities who consider themselves successful and is now lashing out at Bas Smit. “As if he were Our Lord!”
It is ultimately one of the most cringeworthy TV programs of 2025: The Smell of Success, the three-part series in which Antoinnette Scheulderman makes a one-hour bow to unpopular celebrities such as Bas Smit, Sylvie Meis and Halina Reijn. Why do they allow themselves to be interviewed? Because they think of themselves as having a lot of success.
Vain people
The passages with Sylvie are especially scary — she thinks people obsessed being with her and she visibly enjoys it – and Bas’s have a high bowl-for-your-head quality. He claims with dry eyes that people do not see the difficult side of his influencer life. What is that? That sometimes an Instagram story is canceled. Well, well.
It is all incredibly predictable, says Johan Derksen at the table at Today Inside. He was already skeptical before the first broadcast of The Smell of Success. “When I read about that program, I already knew it was going to be miserable, because the people in it are very vain, annoying people.”
Our Lord
Thomas van Groningen then looks for some spicy statements from Johan. “Bas Smit. You think he’s a nice guy, right?”
Johan then: “That boy has done well business-wise, but he pretty much thinks of himself as Our Lord. They are then asked a few sweet questions and then they are allowed to babble.”
Thomas: “Antoinnette Scheulderman is a good journalist, isn’t she?”
Johan: “She thinks so and she has said it everywhere, but I have never seen it and now I have seen this in particular and I think: she is not that good.”
‘Just a fool!’
René van der Gijp also watched and was particularly surprised by Sylvie. She comes across as rather creepy in the program, and says, for example, that her career always takes precedence over her private life. She wants to maintain the ‘obsession’ of the people.
“You can’t imagine going out to dinner with someone like that, right? And he’s going to say things like that to you. Then you think: I’m just going out with a crazy person, you know,” says Gijp.