I dialed into “So Help Me Todd” because I like Marcia Gay Harden, and it was bedtime and I needed a laugh to sleep better. I didn’t get the laugh, but I slept better.

The show is third rate and the rest of the cast is beneath working with her.

Harden is no Cate Blanchett or Meryl Streep, them’s the breaks, but that’s why she seems stuck in television land, and we’re happy to have her.

She was her better cutting edge self as a lawyer in HBO’s “The Newsroom” with Jeff Daniels. A great show that’s still available.

Harden was once the toast of Broadway, a hard street to be the toast of, and she won an Academy Award for 2000’s “Pollock,” and was nominated for her work in 2003’s “Mystic River.” Those are hard to win.

So what is she doing here in a weak-unfunny-CBS comedy “So Help Me Todd” created by Scott Prendergast? Paying the bills while waiting for something better to happen, and it will.

She’s here because creator Prendergast needed a pro to keep Skylar Astin (“Pitch Perfect”) who plays Todd, her son, from looking like an extra.

This is what you get for hanging around CBS late at night.

Astin plays a fourth-rate private eye without Sam Spade’s raincoat or an acting partner like Sydney Greenstreet. Astin loses his license for trusting his last partner.

Now he’s out skulking around grocery store aisles, grabbing sad mothers who are committing insurance fraud.

Skylar is lucky. His mom (Harden) a top dog attorney who at the beginning, is looking for her missing husband (Mark Moses). When they find him, you’ll wonder why they looked.

I won’t waste your time trying to explain the search or anything that comes of it.

Harden, a killer in court who has a plate full of court dramas to cover, hires Todd, despite the ongoing rift between them, to help her find missing hubby.

He does, and that case is closed and future cases with Todd by her side will ensue. Sorry.

Poor Astin, saddled with a ’50s adventure name, should be on Netflix as a teacher in a sitcom.

Here, he bounces around from back alleys to parking garages, sniffing out leads, annoying us with big, wide-eye takes, and over the top gasps, like a skinny Lou Costello back in the ’50s, with no Bud Abbott to slap him back to normal.

Prendergast throws in Madeline Wise (“Whatever this is”) as Todd’s doctor sister, giving us somewhere to go when Todd runs out of gas, and Inga Schlingmann (“Life Coach”) is miscast as Todd’s ex.

“So Help Me” is set in Portland, Oregon, but really in tax healthy Vancouver, Canada.

I don’t expect “So Help Me” to get back this season, so tune in, Marcia Gay Harden is worth watching.

J.P. Devine of Waterville is a former stage and screen actor.

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