Before Steve Bannon became the Chief Strategist in the Trump Administration, he worked for a time in the entertainment industry. Though his involvement was mostly behind the scenes, he flirted briefly with a scripted series that would put him in front of the camera as a private detective. Ultimately the show was never produced, but his idiosyncratic personality shines through in these synopses.
EPISODE 1: “Karen”
For two weeks, an old lady named Karen who lives alone wakes up every morning to discover that her home has been burglarized. But when Karen’s adult son comes by to look at footage from her security camera, there’s no one on it. Terrified, he calls private detective Steve Bannon, who comes over right away. Steve Bannon suggests he’ll solve the mystery by throwing a party for everyone that Karen knows. When all the guests arrive, Steve Bannon wraps her house in industrial strength Saran Wrap and burns it to the ground with everyone trapped inside, including Karen. Case closed.
EPISODE 2: “Stoners”
A man, Jerry, complains to private detective Steve Bannon that area teenagers are smoking weed in his backyard. Steve Bannon nods his head solemnly, then contacts the ringleader of a multi-state heroin operation and tells him that Jerry is planning on ratting him out to the DEA. The heroin ringleader tortures Jerry to death and burns his house to the ground. The teenagers continue to smoke weed at what’s left of Jerry’s picnic table, because it’s now the site of a “cool murder house.”
EPISODE 3: “Painted into a Corner”
Steve Bannon attempts to bring down international art thieves by painting a cheeseburger on Picasso’s La Guernica and dowsing his naked torso in Campho Phenique. This episode ends in a cliffhanger, where all the plumbing in the western hemisphere is meticulously replaced with decaying lead pipes.
EPISODE 4: “Panda Meat”
The staff at a local zoo enlists Steve Bannon to get to the bottom of recent breaches to the panda cage. Using only a magnifying glass and the power of the Sun, Steve Bannon first blinds all of the llamas one by one. Then he feeds all of the pandas to some alligators, whom he’s injected with rabies, punches a koala bear in the face, and finally orders a month of drone strikes that wipe the zoo off the face of the earth. Case closed.
EPISODE 5: “Kill, Kill Again”
A serial killer has haunted the oceanside parkways of Queens for years. Steve Bannon finds him, takes him to a doctor, then a dentist, gets him on some cholesterol meds, helps him move into a new apartment, enrolls him in a 401k, and then says, “I’ll get out of your way now, friend.”
EPISODE 6: “Steve Time”
Steve Bannon uses birdseed to catch — well, it isn’t quite clear — he just throws a handful of birdseed out the window of a building in “Old City” Philadelphia and yells at a doll that looks like a cross between Napoleon and Johnny Thunders.
EPISODE 7: “Kisses Fingers”
Steve Bannon hides inside a Jasper T. Jowls costume onstage at a Chuck E. Cheese’s in order to remove a nine year-old girl from her own birthday party. He’s playing a hunch that “some shit will go down” because her parents once rented Krzysztof Kieslowski’s Three Colors trilogy on Amazon Prime. When the party ends in disaster and tears, Steve Bannon makes the Chuck E. Cheese’s security staff confront workers at a nearby Pizza Hut, because, he says, “there can only be one pizza place.”
EPISODE 8: “Seconds?”
When a department store sees an increase in shoplifting, Steve Bannon dresses up as a priest and goes into a nearby grocery store and sprinkles ricin all over their produce. 81 people die and over 306 are sickened. The department store shoplifting ends because the whole town feels terrorized, and even criminals are demoralized. Steve Bannon frames a Korean man for the poisoning, then has his cats put to sleep while he’s awaiting trial.