Chalk up one more loop in the city’s doom. The crime scene is predictable, the same thing the bleary-eyed detectives see every week. Only the details are new: tonight’s victim is a well-dressed white man lying dead on the pavement.
After a search, the cops find his wallet nearby. They’re shocked. He was a prominent executive at a tech company, the creator of a massively popular cash-transfer app.
Immediately, their speculation begins: Was this a robbery gone bad? A random street crime? Maybe an attack by a mentally ill person? A targeted hit? Something else? What was the city coming to?
The police gaze across the street to an office building bearing the logo of VenZip, the dead executive’s company. Wait a minute, I think. Something isn’t right here.
Then the screen goes black. A familiar sound plays.
Welcome to the second episode of the 23rd (!) season of Law & Order, back after a decade-long hiatus and now streaming on Peacock. The show, famous for ripping its plots from the headlines, had decided to take on the story of Bob Lee, the founder of Cash App, who was stabbed to death in San Francisco in April 2023. (The show transferred the action to New York City, where its characters have jurisdiction.)
I have to admit that while it caught me off guard, it shouldn’t have. Lee’s death has caused an avalanche of content, whether it’s overheated takes on podcasts, breathless coverage in the tabloids, or moment-to-moment coverage in the local press of the trial of Lee’s alleged killer, IT consultant Nima Momeni. I’m as much a part of that avalanche as anyone else: I’m writing a book about Lee and Momeni, due out next year.
It’s one thing to passively watch a show like Law & Order when you know a crime only from the headlines. It’s a completely different experience when you are closely—professionally—following the case. In fact, it was one of the weirdest hours of TV I’ve ever watched, like an episode of Black Mirror written by Nancy Grace or a 30 Rock cutaway parody inside a 30 Rock cutaway parody.
It was so untethered from even the barest adherence to the facts that it provided me an opportunity to see what the rest of the world—or at least one writers’ room—thinks about San Francisco.
From the very beginning, something about Lee’s death has inspired baseless speculation, takes that have verged on fiction even when they were meant to be serious. Elon Musk played detective on Twitter (the DA told him to back off). The investor Jason Calacanis proclaimed that San Francisco was under assault from “thousands of violent crimes that occur every month” (it isn’t). The venture capitalist Matt Ocko said the city’s former district attorney, who had been out of office for almost a year, somehow had “Bob’s literal blood on their hands” (he didn’t).
Even after the arrest of Momeni, who turned out to be an acquaintance of Lee’s, the case continued to be a hot take machine. There have been attempts to link his death to drugs and sex, tech-bro entitlement, and decline. And those are just the links to reputable or quasi-reputable sources. As 2024 rolled around, armchair detectives and city critics began to move on to other topics, like drunkenly tweeting death threats at the San Francisco Board of Supervisors.
Among those who have had a harder time moving on is Krista Lee, Bob’s ex-wife, who is waiting for the outcome of a trial that has dragged on for months already. By phone, she tells me that she hadn’t seen the Law & Order episode yet but that Bob was a big fan. “He would have loved to have seen it,” she says.
I ask her permission to spoil the plot for her and she agrees. As I recount the twists and turns, she laughs. It doesn’t sound at all like the man she married or the crime that befell him. Then again, very little of what has been said about Lee has been recognizable to her. “It’s cringy,” she says.
But she understands why people love to watch. “The funniest thing is that one of Bob’s guilty pleasures was staying in bed all day and binge-watching a show,” she says.
Over its many decades and spin-offs, Law & Order has mastered a formula as ironclad as any on television. In the first half, the police try to solve a crime; in the second, the prosecutors try to convict the suspect. It’s a great show to put on while you’re folding laundry or taking a nap. I used to love the reruns of the show, whether they were ripped from the Bernhard Goetz subway shooting (!), the sexual harassment lawsuit against Bill O’Reilly (!!), or even the assassination of Malcom X (!?!?!?!).
The formula is always the same. Only the window dressing is new.
As Bill Hader’s Stefon would say, this particular episode has everything: Sentient artificial intelligence; mass layoffs; deepfakes; open marriages; a psychedelic doula; the collapse of the banking system; class warfare between billionaires and millionaires; a plot to corner the world’s water supply that I swear was taken from one of Daniel Craig’s James Bond films. There’s a broccoli-headed SoundCloud rapper, a detective whose only job is to read posts on the internet to the other two detectives, and an 83-year-old Sam Waterston, who spends most of his brief scenes sitting down and making wildly irresponsible prosecutorial choices.
It’s compelling, if schlocky, television. If you want to understand Lee’s death, this episode of Law & Order will not help you. It’s a stew of nonsense, a pile of outdated clichés. ChatGPT could’ve come up with the script.
Something about San Francisco seems to lend itself to fictionalization, sometimes incisive, often very broad, from the series of books about Mary Ellen Pleasant to David Fincher’s Zodiac.
In our multiplatform era, a kind of truth-adjacent storytelling is fueling multiple cottage industries, as networks, streamers, podcast networks, and movie studios hunt for real stories that satisfy our hunger for true-ish content. It’s something I’ve been wrestling with myself as I work on the book. Am I playing an unwitting part in this reality gold rush? Is it possible to cover a story like Bob Lee’s death and not play into the worst impulses of the market?
I don’t know. I do know that we’re living in a golden age of truth-adjacent stories. Each of us is one bad, public moment away from being the subject of the next big Netflix docudrama. In fact, this is the plot of a recent actual Black Mirror episode, proving that the content generated by the techno-capital-media-streaming-entertainment complex follows the same rule that Descartes thought God did: if you can imagine it, that means it must exist.
And there’s more coming. I hear another network is working on a Lee episode too. Wonder how they’ll work AI into it.•
Scott Lucas is a writer living in San Francisco who covers politics and technology. He has written for publications including San Francisco magazine, The Information, and Politico.
