‘So Help Me Todd’: Skylar Astin on ‘Finding the Funny’ With Guest Star Dean Winters (Exclusive)

The new episode of So Help Me Todd is going to be quite an entertaining one that will see a bit of a role reversal once again for Margaret and Todd, as well as someone new helping Todd. Airing tonight, March 14, “Dial Margaret for Murder” will see Todd believing he overheard a murder plot while in the hospital recovering from an emergency appendectomy. Margaret’s clients are interested in the situation, so she jumps into an investigator role and brings them along for the ride. On top of that, Todd gets help from Dean Winters’ Dick Franks, a veteran private investigator who becomes his mentor while sharing a hospital room.

In an exclusive interview with PopCulture.com, Skylar Astin previewed the upcoming episode and mentioned that “nobody believes Todd because he’s heavily sedated.” He continued, “But we also get to meet Dick Franks, played by Dean Winters, who is kind of an old grizzled detective who becomes Todd’s mentor throughout the next few episodes and kind of teaches Todd that in order to be a great detective, you have to be a bit of a lone wolf. And we get to kind of explore that with Todd and what he can and cannot do by being a lone wolf.”

With Dean Winters in the mix, it seems like this will be a new dynamic duo that fans won’t want to miss out on. Astin says Dick becomes Todd’s mentor “throughout the whole new discovery of Todd’s version 2.0. Our chemistry was just there right from the get-go. We rehearsed the first scene in the trailer just to kind of get situated. And once we were showing our first scenes of the crew with basically a captive audience, everyone was already laughing and loving the vibe and he was just so easy to work with, such a delight. He had so many great ideas. And I just love when people come in and bring a very larger-than-life character to life. And that’s what he did. He ended up grounding it in such a great way but also keeping all of the hilarity and everything that makes Dick Franks, Dick Franks.”

Since Todd will be staying in his hospital room for most of the episode, it is nice that he will have someone else to talk to and bump ideas off during the whole investigation — not to mention someone who has this sort of experience. That doesn’t mean it was easy, however, since he has nowhere to go. But for Astin, he was having fun with it.

“Sure, it’s nice to get up and move around and kind of find energy that way,” Astin shared. “But once I started working with Dean on the specific scenes where he was involved in, he was able to kind of free up his body a little bit more because he was my suitemate in the hospital, but wasn’t as limited and restricted in his movements as I was. So it was really just fun to kind of cook in that room. And we kind of shot all the scenes over the course of a couple of days, kind of jam-packed them. So it was a bit of the Todd and Dick show, and Allison was also heavily involved in that storyline as well. So, three of us just really had a fun time doing those scenes and finding the funny and finding where we can pull hijinks from a seated position.”

As with any episode of So Help Me Todd, it sounds like this episode is one you won’t want to miss a single second of. Be sure to watch the new episode tonight, March 14, at 9:01 p.m. ET on CBS’ spring 2024 schedule.