TV tonight: 'Hart of Dixie,' 'Raising Hope,' 'Vegas'

• How did 'Hart of Dixie' get a second season?
• Fox's 'Raising Hope,' meanwhile, begins a well-deserved third season
• CBS' excellent 'Vegas' settles in for a (hopefully) long run

Hart of Dixie
CW, 8 ET/PT

The good thing about airing on a network with tragically low ratings expectations is that even a show as ridiculous and roundly ignored as Hart of Dixie can get extended to a second season. The bad thing is ... well, you know. For those who have forgotten where we left off, George (Scott Porter) pretty much ruined his wedding to Lemon (Jaime King) by confessing his love for Dr. Zoe (Rachel Bilson), who isn't sure whether she loves him or Wade (Wilson Bethel). And TV writers wonder why reality shows have caught on.

Raising Hope
Fox, 8 ET/PT

You'd be hard-pressed to find a funnier, better-performed portrait of loving yet blissfully inept parenting than you get every week from Martha Plimpton and Garret Dillahunt, who return as Virginia and Burt Chance in a very funny season premiere of Raising Hope. Tonight, the Chance family — including Cloris Leachman's Maw Maw, as inappropriate as ever, but, thankfully, less grotesque — meets Sabrina's mother at her grandmother's funeral. In a Hollywood cameo joke, mom is played by Melanie Griffith, and grandma by Griffith's mother, Tippi Hedren.

Vegas
CBS, 10 ET/PT

After a strong opener, Vegas now settles down into the treacherous business of telling a weekly story — and, this being a CBS procedural, solving a weekly murder (in this case, the murder of a craps dealer). And like many new shows, it's also using its second episode to introduce a new character — Alcatraz's Sarah Jones as the daughter of a Chicago Mob boss, who has been sent to keep an eye on Michael Chiklis' Savino.