The new CBS series, “So Help Me Todd” may not be filmed in Portland, but creator Scott Prendergast says the Rose City was a significant inspiration for the comedy-drama, which stars Skylar Astin (“Pitch Perfect”) and Oscar-winner Marcia Gay Harden as a son and mother who work together at a Portland law firm.
“My family’s been in Portland forever, and Portland is such a huge part of my life,” says Prendergast.
“So Help Me Todd” is set in Portland, and as Prendergast says, he intentionally added local references. While he drew from his relationship with his real mother in creating the characters of Todd (Astin) and Margaret Wright (Harden), other characters are fictional, though solidly placed in Portland.
For example, Todd’s sister in the show is a doctor at a Portland hospital (think OHSU). Other characters work for Oregon’s governor, the Portland Trail Blazers and for a newspaper called The Portland Sentinel. .
Prendergast, 52, wanted the reporter character to work for The Oregonian, but that didn’t happen. “I think it was just legal and clearances,” he says.
“So Help Me Todd” is filming in Vancouver, British Columbia, a hot spot for TV and movie production because of government incentives that help producers save money.
“I tried to get the show shot in Portland, but I couldn’t pull it off,” says Prendergast, calling from the show’s Los Angeles production office. “The Canadian dollar was too attractive.”
In the pilot for the show, Todd is a former private detective who has hit a low point in his life after he made some bad decisions, and had his license revoked. His mother, Margaret, is a by-the-book attorney who doesn’t shy away from giving advice to her children, and who is particularly exasperated with Todd.
Amid his mother’s stern declarations that Todd needs to put together a plan to live as a financially solvent adult, a sudden turn of events finds the two teaming up. When Margaret’s husband disappears, Todd uses his unconventional skills to try and find the missing man.
Without giving away exactly what happens – which involves a stakeout at a house in Gresham, a client accused of murder, and more – Margaret is so impressed by Todd’s outside-the-box approach and abilities that she agrees to bring him into her firm as a private investigator.
The pilot establishes the back-and-forth banter shared by Todd and Margaret, a tone Prendergast says was inspired by playful detective series of the past, “throwback shows like ‘Hart to Hart’ or ‘Moonlighting’ or ‘Remington Steele,’” as he says.
Prendergast was such a fan of “Moonlighting” — the series that paired Cybill Shepherd as the owner of a floundering detective agency and Bruce Willis as investigator-with-attitude David Addison — that when he was a student at Wilson High School (now Ida B. Wells High School), “we shot our own episode, and I played David Addison. ‘So Help Me Todd’ is meant to be an homage to ‘Moonlighting,’ where they’re solving crimes, and arguing.”
“So Help Me Todd” includes elements inspired by Prendergast’s own experiences. After growing up in Hillsdale, and graduating high school, he went to college at Columbia, in New York City. When he hit hard times trying to find work as an actor and filmmaker in New York, Prendergast came back to Portland “with my tail between my legs.” His mother was working as a real estate agent at a Windemere office, and Prendergast spent time working there, he says, as a “terrible” receptionist.
In a parallel to the plot of the “So Help Me Todd” pilot, the husband of Prendergast’s mother – his parents had gotten divorced some years earlier – went missing. Prendergast helped find the missing man as his mother and he acted as their own private detectives.
While “So Help Me Todd” is influenced by his life and family – a trait shared in common with Prendergast’s 2007 film, “Kabluey,” which grew out of the filmmaker’s experience with his sister-in-law during her husband’s National Guard deployment in Iraq – there are other issues Prendergast wants to explore in the CBS show.
“The reason I wanted the show to be set in Portland is because I wanted to write about Portland,” says Prendergast, who now lives with his family in Los Angeles.
“Portland is two cities,” Prendergast says. There’s the old Portland he grew up in, when his family lived off Terwilliger Boulevard, and people would talk about going to Henry Thiele’s and the Carnival – now both gone – to eat.
“The Marcia Gay Harden character remembers old things about Portland, and the son is more connected to the youth culture,” Prendergast says. “I know Portland is changing, there’s a whole new world of people, and there’s a new Portland with social and environmental activists, and people who have come from other places.”
Despite the city’s reputation taking a hit in recent years, Prendergast says, “I love Portland, and I wanted to present an image to world of Portland as a fun, beautiful, exciting place. I hope ‘So Help Me Todd’ is a hit, so that we can come to Portland, and shoot at Powell’s, and I can have a Pizzicato Caesar salad.”
