New Delhi, Aug. 21 -- My comfort-food show these days happens to be a sitcom from the 1990s. Over the years, I'd caught reruns of Mad About You-starring Paul Reiser and the incomparable Helen Hunt-but now, watching the seven-season series episode by episode, I'm properly charmed.

Imagine the smallest annoyances of a relationship being elevated, through the New York clamour, into the stuff of gentle opera. Picture Paul and Jamie Buchman, he a neurotic documentary filmmaker, she an eloquently practical PR executive, sparring over the size of a couch (nee loveseat) as if the whole world depended on it. In a way, it does. Mad About You is all about the inevitable chaos of cohabitation and co-dependence. The show is so obsessed with the micro...