Where would America be without its diners? Or for that matter, where would US culture be without them? Now here's another dramatic piece set in America's version of the greasy spoon, a sassily scripted sitcom by Whitney Cummings and Michael Patrick King, who created Sex and the City. Whereas SATC was set in Manhattan, 2 Broke Girls is located in New York City's less monied, but nowadays more groovy, borough of Brooklyn.

It's a brave sitcom writer who dares to write a bleakly comic drama, without canned laughter, in which nothing very much happens and where a long-married couple natter away about the mundane details of their lives in the half-hour after they come home from work. But twin sisters Emma and Beth Kilcoyne have done just that, and the result, Roger and Val Have Just Got In, is a thing of quiet beauty.

I love the idea of Armstrong & Miller. Alexander Armstrong has his odious toff routine off to a tee, the clubbable rotter who'll cheat at golf, get you to pay for all the whisky sours in the clubhouse, and then shag your wife. Alongside, Ben Miller exists in a cloud of brainy abstraction, convinced that his serial bungling failures are merely the prelude to roaring success.

Joy was unconfined in my house as the J-team reunited for Christmas to give us the greatest gift of the season. Not that baby and his royal visitors in Bethlehem but Jennifer Saunders, who gathered together her old mates Joanna Lumley, Jane Horrocks, June Whitfield and Julia Sawalha for a cracker of a reunion stuffed with gags.

To start a new sitcom with 18 seconds of unbroken silence after the opening music has faded is a brave move. Such minimalism is not to everyone's taste and some viewers may switch off there and then, but others will recognise it as the calling card of minimalist comedy, which is unafraid of silence or indeed inaction.

So Fresh Meat approaches the conclusion of season one and, against my expectations, I’ve become a devoted fan. When it was announced that Peep Show creators Jesse Armstrong and Sam Bain were launching a new sitcom, based around a Manchester student household, it sounded promising; perhaps a postmodern update on The Young Ones was in the offing. Peep Show fans were expecting a riot of sordid humour and cruel jokes of embarrassment. We had those in spades. What we weren’t expecting were such wonderfully written and acted character studies.

A few years ago something curious happened to Tom Hollander. He grew up. As a brilliant young actor he won the Sunday Times Ian Charleson Award for a series of stage performances whose governing tone was mercurial energy. But as he moved into film, the sense was of an actor who was more eager to be noticed than believed. In the past few years, however, he has found a vulnerable side, as a hapless government minister in In The Loop and most recently as a minister of the church, the Reverend Adam Smallbone. This week sees Rev’s second coming.

Pete Versus Life, being a bit of a departure from the sitcom norm, wasn't to everyone's taste when the first series was screened last year; but I'm very glad that Channel 4 commissioners kept faith with it and have now brought it back for a longer second season - and that its occasional weak points have been tweaked to great effect.

Few comedy writers can claim to have extracted so much mirth from the slightly foxed fabric of British life as David Croft, who (with his writing partner Jimmy Perry) created It Ain't Half Hot Mum, Hi-de-Hi! and, above all, Dad's Army. Though the latter initially fell foul of BBC One's controller Paul Fox, who protested that "you cannot take the mickey out of Britain's finest hour", its ineffably absurd and eccentric portrait of the Home Guard in wartime Walmington-on-Sea proved irresistible to millions of viewers.

From the long shot of the suburban London semis onwards, I couldn’t help but think of the 1960s BBC sitcom Not in Front of the Children which similarly focused on a middle-class couple with three children. There’s no laughter track on Outnumbered but there’s also no escaping the fact that - apart from a colourful new range of insults the kids casually fire at each other (“numb-chuck”, “toss-piece”) - this could easily be one of Wendy Craig’s naughty but nice TV families, bickering over breakfast and complaining about the burnt fish fingers. Oh and look, there’s John Sessions playing the quirky buffoon of a vicar.