Why CBS Canceled So Help Me Todd

Does any major network do wacky show titles as well (or, depending on your sense of humor, as cringe-inducingly) as CBS? I don’t think so. It’s the home of such creatively, chaotically named shows as “Jake and the Fatman,” “Gary Unmarried,” “Joan of Arcadia,” “United States of Al,” “Syzyszynk,” and — my personal favorite, name-wise — “God Friended Me.” The network’s wacky titles go all the way back to TV’s golden age, but their schedule still features several weirdly named shows today. Without giving each of them a watch, it’s hard to tell your “Georgie & Mandy’s First Marriage” from your “Bob Hearts Abishola,” but one unusually named show made its mark recently with a short but loved two-season run: “So Help Me Todd.”

The name of “So Help Me Todd” gives few hints about the show’s premise, but it was actually about a flailing private detective (“Pitch Perfect” alum Skylar Astin) who ends up working at the law firm run by his by-the-book mother (Oscar and Tony-winner Marcia Gay Harden) in the Pacific Northwest. Together, the mother-son odd couple team up to investigate cases of the week (some of which are so very Portland) and, in the second season, to uncover a larger conspiracy. The show’s cast also included Madeline Wise, Tristen J. Winger, Inga Schlingmann, and Rosa Evangelina Arredondo, with former “Glee” star Heather Morris joining in the sophomore season. “So Help Me Todd” earned mixed reviews, but it also had millions of regular viewers, so its premature cancellation in April 2024 was met with plenty of frustration. Here’s why it ended.

The cancellation of “So Help Me Todd” was announced in April 2024, alongside the news that another CBS show — this one with ties to a hugely popular franchise — also bit the bullet. “CSI: Vegas” was cut short after just three seasons (compared to the flagship “CSI” show, which ran for a whopping fifteen), and “So Help Me Todd” was axed at the same time. This was, as Deadline pointed out, a relatively unsurprising cut due to the “overall belt-tightening by the media companies,” which has resulted in massive changes to television over the past few years. Showtime and AMC have both instigated substantial staff layoffs since 2022, while the CW chopped and hacked its way through its entire preexisting lineup beginning that same year. The less that’s said about the overwhelming number of changes made to HBO and its streamer during these lean times, the better.

CBS has not come out of the recent economic bumps the industry has faced — including a pandemic, a long-overdue Hollywood labor movement, and massive political upheaval — unscathed. In a separate piece, Deadline noted that “there is financial pressure on [the] corporate level among all traditional media companies to curb spending amid a soft ad market.” Basically, at the time “So Help Me Todd” was canceled, there were more companies trying to sell ad space than there were advertisers trying to buy it, an issue that affects major networks more than subscriber-based streamers. It also likely doesn’t help that CBS parent company Paramount was in the middle of a lengthy merger with Skydance Media around this time, and corporate mergers typically lead to some level of internal changeover, if not a total bloodbath.

All of this led to the network’s decision to cancel several shows. 2024 saw the end not only of “So Help Me Todd” and “NCIS: Vegas,” but also of long-running mainstay programming like “Young Sheldon,” “Blue Bloods,” and “The Talk,” plus additional shows including “Bob Hearts Abishola,” “Comics Unleashed,” and “NCIS: Hawai’i.”

Of course, when it comes to TV programming, the “out with the old” part of the equation often has to be balanced out by the “in with the new” of it all. Deadline also cited “shelf space” at CBS when speaking about the spring 2024 cancellations, making it clear that the show’s cancellation was part of a business decision intended to bring in new programming. This, too, is pretty typical for media merger periods, and unfortunately, “So Help Me Todd” was on the lower end of the ratings chart compared to other CBS dramas. “Todd” racked up 7.7 million viewers across multiple platforms, a number that would be way higher than a zeitgeist-shifting show like “Succession” if the title were on pay cable, but is relatively low for a Big Four channel with as massive a market share as CBS.

Thus, CBS waved goodbye to “So Help Me Todd,” and with no time to rework its existing storyline before its finale dropped in a month, the show ended on a major cliffhanger. “I think the number one thing that worked against us was CBS has too many hour-long shows that are working too well,” series creator Scott Prendergast told Deadline after the finale. “The real estate is not there.”

The 9pm Thursday night slot that the show used to occupy was given to “Elsbeth,” the quirky and delightful “The Good Fight” spinoff starring Carrie Preston as an attorney consulting with the NYPD on mysterious cases. With its “Columbo”-like format and co-creators Robert and Michelle King’s distinctive flair, “Elsbeth” is much better than most of what network TV has to offer, but it’s a shame another unique, offbeat show lost out due to the ever-cutthroat nature of the media industry. CBS continued to move its schedule around, too, with “Young Sheldon” and “Ghosts” both occupying the 9pm hour later in the 2023-24 broadcast year.

“So Help Me Todd” had plenty of fans when it was on, but the show’s fandom really made itself known when it was cut short prematurely. Upon cancellation, the series’ cast and crew revealed that “Todd” had a planned ending, news that led fans to publicly share their passion in hopes of landing it a third season or a new home. “What kills me the most is I know how the series was really supposed to end,” star Skylar Astin posted to X at the time. He continued: “It was perfect. Emotional, full circle, and perfectly Todd.”

The ending viewers got instead was incomplete, with Marcia Gay Harden’s Margaret pretty convincingly framed for embezzlement and other white-collar crimes. The man behind the crimes, Merritt Folding, was a partner at the show’s central law firm who had never actually shown up throughout the show. However, his shoes stepped into frame during the last seconds of the season 2 finale, in a cliffhanger that Prendergast told TVLine a CBS exec encouraged him to pursue, believing the show was safe. He also said that they’d been hoping to cast “The Sopranos” and “Bound” star Joe Pantoliano in the role of Folding.

In reaction to the cancelation news, fans set up at least two different Change.org petitions in hopes of getting the show another season, and one even threatened a boycott. Together, the two petitions have roughly 55,000 signatures, but there’s been no news on a future return of “So Help Me Todd” yet, and most of the cast and crew have said some pretty final-sounding goodbyes. In his own farewell post on Instagram, Prendergast wrote “Thank you to everyone involved, and to all our viewers. One million thank yous will never be enough. Thank you, thank you, thank Todd for you. And goodbye.”

You can stream both seasons of “So Help Me Todd” on Paramount+, purchase them digitally on Apple TV and Amazon, or buy them on DVD now.