TV REVIEW : ‘Nightman’: Intriguing Bit of Rivalry

“The Nightman” (at 9 p.m. Sunday on NBC, Channels 4, 36 and 39) is a cleverly woven thriller about a mother and daughter’s sexual jealousy over a nightman whom the mother hires one hot and humid summer to run her resort hotel on a piney lakeside in Georgia.

The rigid, lonely mother (Joanna Kerns) and her sexually aggressive teen daughter (Jenny Robertson) leave bloody imprints all over the rambling hotel in their fierce rivalry for the virile hired hand (Ted Marcoux), who’s hopelessly caught between the two women.

The script by John Wells is nominally Gothic and kind of eerie but not as pulpy as the plot may sound. As suspense thrillers on television go, the production stands above most because of its unusual sense of place and its stylish execution by director-producer Charles Haid.

The story opens on the daughter 19 years after her mother’s murder (in some fancy aging by the obsessed and haunted Robertson) and shifts to sunny flashbacks of the lurid lakeside events that led to that murder.

The daughter’s older and younger personas are imaginatively dramatized not only by Robertson’s acting range but also by the flavorful, alternate settings--the stark, machinery-laden penthouse condo under renovation where the adult daughter lives, and the bucolic, raggedy resort hotel where she played and hyperventilated as an adolescent.

In a bizarre, idiotic touch, played out against the squabbling principals and the doddering resort guests, we hear live radio reports of the Watergate hearings.

As the working stiff, Marcoux delivers a steady, lean performance as a mortal too foolish and too willing to know what hit him.