Triumph-over-adversity stories are usually routine TV, but...

Triumph-over-adversity stories are usually routine TV, but last year’s Nobody’s Child, which repeats Sunday at 9 p.m. on CBS, is special--thanks largely to director Lee Grant and to Marlo Thomas. Thomas is splendid as the real-life Marie Balter, who suffered from paranoia and hallucinations as the result of a traumatic childhood and spent nearly 20 years in a mental institution. She went on to get a master’s degree from Harvard and work as a supervisor in a mental health agency. Thomas is luminous in an unglamorous role, her acting heartfelt and true.

Also airing at 9 p.m. Sunday are two new TV movies, Bluffing It (on ABC), in which Dennis Weaver plays a middle-aged factory foreman who has managed to keep secret his illiteracy, and Private Eye (on NBC), which is serving as a two-hour preview for a new series. Set on the Sunset Strip, circa 1956, it stars Michael Woods as an ex-cop who inherits his brother’s detective agency and Josh Brolin as a young rock ‘n’ roller who helps Woods investigate the brother’s suspicious death.

Irreconcilable Differences (NBC Monday at 9 p.m.) is one of the wittiest Hollywood movies of the ‘80s. Ryan O’Neal and Shelley Long star as a struggling director and his screenwriter-wife whose lives spin out of control when O’Neal finally gets his big break to such an extent that their 10-year-old daughter, Drew Barrymore, sues them for divorce. Charles Shyer directed from his and his wife Nancy Meyers’ script, which in some aspects clearly takes its inspiration from the breakup of the marriage of director Peter Bogdanovich and writer-producer-production designer Polly Platt and Bogdanovich’s subsequent romance with Cybill Shepherd.

A Soldier’s Story (CBS Tuesday at 9 p.m.), Norman Jewison’s absorbing but melodramatic filming of the Charles Russell play, stars Howard E. Rollins as a confident black captain and military attorney assigned to investigate the shooting of a hate-filled black regular-Army sergeant (Adolph Caesar) near a fictitious Louisiana Army base in late 1944. A Soldier’s Story, which brings to mind Jewison’s similar “In the Heat of the Night,” is a strong, timeless drama which shows blacks can be as twisted by hatred for their own people as whites; strangely, the horrifying irony of the play’s finish has been defused.

Killer in the Mirror, a 1986 TV movie which repeats on NBC Tuesday at 9 p.m., stars Ann Jillian in a dual role.

Mr. Mom (ABC Thursday at 9 p.m.) finds a fired Michael Keaton becoming a househusband when his wife, Teri Garr, lands a job. It’s nothing special but it was a big hit when it opened five years ago, thanks mainly to its stars.

National Lampoon’s Vacation (CBS Friday at 9 p.m.) runs out of gas before it gets under way. Anyone who has ever journeyed across this country by car knows the experience is ripe for satire, but what we’re given here is a string of jokes, gags and stunts so lame as to not warrant description. Chevy Chase stars as an All-American idiot from Chicago who hits the road with his wife (Beverly D’Angelo, who’s wasted) and their two kids.

Imagine a video game that becomes the real thing in outer space. That’s the premise of The Last Starfighter (CBS Saturday at 9 p.m.), but its ingenuity is dissipated, allowing it to play like another “Star Wars” installment (with a generous borrowing from “Close Encounters of the Third Kind”). Lance Guest plays a young video game whiz recruited by a mysterious but persuasive Robert Preston (in his final role) to zoom off to the planet Rylos to help defend the Rylans from their dreaded enemies.