CBS helps itself to a second season of So Help Me Todd

CBS, the network that rarely, if ever, met a law-adjacent procedural TV show it didn’t like, has just announced that it’s bringing its freshman series So Help Me Todd more fully into its quasi-immortal TV fold, granting a second season to the series. News of the renewal comes via TVLine, and arrives as the show is gearing up for the last two episodes of its 13-episode first season.

So Help Me Todd stars Skylar Astin as the Titular Todd, a private investigator forced by circumstances to work for his mother, a prestigious and rule-abiding Portland lawyer played by Marcia Gay Harden. The series follows a case-of-the-week format, with each episode seeing the mother-son duo solve cases through periodic bickering and occasional familial teamwork.

As it happens, we talked to Astin earlier this week, asking him about the show’s future for an upcoming interview. And although he couldn’t spill any deep secrets about what might be next for Todd’s second season, he did note that the show will continue to explore the question of how Todd lost his investigator’s license in the first place, establishing a more long-form narrative for the series. (He also talked WWE’s Royal Rumble and Pitch Perfect; Skylar Astin contains multitudes.)

It’s not hard to see why CBS has gravitated toward So Help Me Todd, which co-stars Madeline Wise, Tristen J. Winger, Inga Schlingmann, and Rosa Evangelina Arredondo. The series trades in a blend of family comedy/drama and legal/extra-legal action that is pretty much exactly the network’s bread and butter. It’s also been a decent investment: although it ranks low on the list of CBS dramas, ratings-wise, it’s still the third-most successful freshman series of the TV season overall, bringing in an average of 6.3 million viewers each week.