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.
I spent an entire bus ride to the Genius Bar and back today pondering exactly that. Below the jump are some of my guesses. Note: though these are like 98 percent jokes, there’s still part of me that wonders if, given an entire 32 more chapters, we might end up seeing at least one of these.