More on that below.Ĭathy/Rufus/Chuck/That Weird Plot Inconsistency That's Never Really Discussed He's important because we eventually find out that Sylvester is something of an unreliable narrator. Every once and a while he'll sing, 'Oh shit!' at exactly the right time. He first makes his appearance in a different closet altogether, pausing the action and popping out to ramp up the tension for when we find out that Bridget's been sleeping with Big Man the midget. This is a guy who looks, acts, sings and probably smells exactly like Sylvester, but he's not Sylvester. His main method of conflict resolution is drawing his gun on whoever confuses him. He has a really nice house and tends to be level-headed and diplomatic until he gets stressed out. It's hinted that Sylvester's got a dark past, with five years in the penitentiary under his belt and connections to various members of the Chicago crime underworld. You know Sylvester well, you put up with his superfluous suit changes, chuckle at his love of smokable tobacco products and guffaw at his hatred of smokable marijuana products.

In other words, he's the dude who gets hidden in the titular closet in the very first episode. Kelly himself, Sylvester is the hero and the main catalyst for most of the story's action. To celebrate tonight's triumphant return of Trapped at 9PM on IFC, here's our handy guide to some of the key characters and plot points in the series. Kelly realized that by going off the same basic beat for the entire thing and using his own voice for every single character, he could foreground the stuff that really mattered, which includes his insane levels of talent and creativity as well as his insane level of insanity.

Trapped In The Closet is special because it takes the idea that a story can and should be told through hip-hop (something anyone who's ever seen that terrible adaptation of Carmen starring Beyoncé knows) and blows it up conceptually while scaling it back musically. Kelly's R&B soap opera is one of the funniest, most expansive, intertextual and downright bizarre things to happen to pop music in the past fifteen years. The original episode of Trapped In The Closet came out in 2005 if you can believe it, so you'd be forgiven for letting a few key plot details have slipped your brain.

Trapped in the closet full synopsis