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Lots of folks “enjoyed” Trapped in the Closet in a snarky, condescending way—which severely bums out the people who, despite the high likelihood that they hold a very negative view of the man himself, consider R. Kelly’s catalog to be some of the best R&B music ever made. But I think everyone can agree that the wildly surreal, 22-part dramedy remains one of the weirdest—and thus most compelling—things to happen to pop music in the past couple decades. (And as a successful attempt to turn the public perception of Kelly from “guy who pees on underage girls” to “wacky conceptual stuntman,” it’s one of the all-time spin-control coups in public-relations history.) The IFC, which had a ratings bonanza with Closet, has announced that it will air 32 more episodes of the “hip-hopera,” which is just an obscene amount of wish fulfillment for anyone who’s wondered where R. Kelly would take his James-Joyce-on-bath-salts tale if given even more space than the already ludicrous first installment.
