Midway through the second series, Misfits (E4) is hurtling along as assuredly as always, never letting viewers find their feet: even as one weird mystery is more or less explained, several more crop up to keep you guessing. This week Curtis cannot keep away from the girl whose flat the Misfits raided last week – complete with dirty protest from Nathan – thinking it belonged to the masked watcher who has been shadowing them. Curtis recognises her from a premonition he had, but if she knows him, she's not being very forthcoming. Then again, they broke into her flat and left a poo in her bed; she's got a right to be standoffish.

The watcher turns out to be none other than – and if you haven't seen this episode yet, rest assured I'm about to ruin it for you – Simon! Not just Simon, but Simon from the future. And Future Simon is not nerdy and odd; he's sexy, assured and well-muscled, with a very cool flat. Girls cannot resist a boy from the future, and Alisha's infatuation with him gives rise to a love scene that I can only describe as extremely grown-up. I was left wondering where Future Simon buys his lovely sheets. Some place that doesn't exist yet, no doubt.

Nerdy old Simon is still around, of course ("you can never tell Simon I'm him," Future Simon tells Alisha), and Nathan is pretending to be in love with him. Or is he? He can't really be gay, can he? It doesn't fit in with what we know about Nathan, or what he said to the menacing tattooist with a rose inked on his neck: "It would look gay on me," he told him, "because I've got such a beautiful face, but you get away with it."

And yet Nathan seems to be as confused by his feelings for Simon as we are (and as Simon is). "Gay, straight, retarded," he says. "Why do we have to put labels on everything?"

It is impossible to become inured to Misfits. It's still preposterous, and still manages to be scary with it. It's also still funny, and jarringly shocking. It rolls around joyously in its own filth. All that and great music, too. One can only imagine how bad the inevitable American version will be.

Raising Hope (Sky1) turned in an underwhelming debut last week, with a few flat jokes and a cartoonish, almost nostalgic take on the American working class. It made the odd misstep of believing that because poor people are poor, they have old, crappy stuff – stuff that is, luckily, also rather photogenic. And it had a strangely sentimental ending for a programme that seemed hell-bent on assuring us its heart was in the wrong place. It was the pilot episode, so maybe the writers were hedging their bets.

Last night's offering, I'm pleased to say, was of a different order: perverse, briskly paced and hilarious, worth it for the instructive ukulele songs from the daycare worker with the dead tooth alone (she looks after babies, pets and the elderly simultaneously, and her golden rule is "Don't bite").

You didn't need to see the pilot to get up to speed anyway. Jimmy Chance's mates dropped by to see if he wanted to fake-fight on the bridge to freak people out. "I can't," he told them. "Remember that girl I got pregnant that murdered all those people? They executed her and I got stuck with the baby." That's pretty much all you needed to know.

Jimmy lives with his immature parents and his often topless, infrequently lucid Maw Maw (played by the magnificent Cloris Leachman). In this episode he was still trying to get better acquainted with the pretty girl from the grocery store while avoiding the attentions of the dead-toothed girl, while also trying to make his baby smile. When Jimmy's around, the baby has just one expression: a look of veiled reproach.

It's funny, I find I'm prepared to forgive Raising Hope anything. The family may be a caricature, but I can accept that they are simply the oddest and most dysfunctional family in town, and not archetypes for working class America. Lucas Neff, as Jimmy, has a way of underplaying things that takes some getting used to, but I'm used to it now.

The whole thing seems much fresher. And this time around I think they've found themselves a slightly better baby. I probably shouldn't say that. It's not a better baby; it's just a better actor.