Banks first gained notice with his one-man show Home Entertainment Center, a self-written play about a young man struggling to meet a writing deadline and fighting his own tendency to distract and amuse himself; the play contained several songs written by Banks. The show was televised in 1989, and led to a special and short-lived sitcom, both titled The Steven Banks Show. He continued to appear occasionally in film and television in the 1990s, guesting on Caroline in the City and Dharma & Greg, before moving into animation, scripting episodes of the Nickelodeon series CatDog, Jimmy Neutron, and SpongeBob SquarePants. He also reinvented himself as a performer, drawing on his earlier clown training to become Billy the Mime, performer of such routines as "John F. Kennedy Jr., We Hardly Knew Y