Bravo’s ‘Listings’ should be booed

If you can’t create, or cast, characters people love, you might as well fill your shows with characters people love to hate. That appears to be the Bravo formula for the “Real Housewives” series, and it also works overtime for “Million Dollar Listings” (10 p.m., Bravo).

Let’s face it: Everything about the show is purposefully perverse. It’s beyond bad taste to tout sales of tycoon-worthy real estate when Americans are suffering through the worst housing market since the Great Depression. On the other hand, during the Great Depression, moviegoers couldn’t get enough of silly comedies about the idle rich, so go figure.

The three male real-estate agents on “Million” sport easy-to-deride Hollywood names: Chad, Madison and Josh. They’re rich, young, spoiled and too self-involved to have ever developed personalities, never mind interesting ones. The creepiest of the three staggers under a hairstyle appropriate to a castoff from an Oasis tribute band. Another one dedicates himself to his body to keep up with what he calls his “superficial” clientele. The third bores us with tales of his drug years and his even more tedious sobriety.

The Bravo approach is effective but never subtle. They want you to feel superior to these creatures so you can watch their Target ads in a good mood. At one point, a would-be client seems aghast at the young real-estate agent waving contracts in his face. He then makes a crack about an aging portrait somewhere, as in Oscar Wilde’s “The Picture of Dorian Gray.” Without missing a beat, our young hustler inquires, “Who’s Dorian Gray?” as if he might be someone in search of a good real-estate agent.

¢ “P.O.V.” (9 p.m., PBS, check local listings) presents “Johnny Cash: The Man, His World, His Music,” a film from 1969 by Robert Elfstrom. “Cash” not only documents the singer at one of the most important periods of his life, it represents an exciting moment in the evolution of the documentary, using hand-held cameras to provide a never-before-seen intimacy with its subject.

While it’s often clear that Cash is not always comfortable with the camera, we catch him performing hits onstage, working on songs at home, backstage with young talent at the second annual Country Music Awards, singing before a prison audience and sharing a studio duet with a young and nervous Bob Dylan, warbling “One Too Many Mornings” and chewing gum at the same time.

The film underscores Cash’s relationship with June Carter, his very personal Christianity and his intense connection to the poor and dispossessed, like sharecroppers, prisoners, American Indians and the owner of a filling station bypassed by a new interstate. Cash, who died in 2003, could never have emerged in the culture of conspicuous wealth and celebrity narcissism behind shows like “Million Dollar Listing.”

Tonight’s other highlights

¢ A recent convert to a strict sect collapses at her wedding reception on “House” (8 p.m., Fox).

¢ Jack hovers between life and death on “Without a Trace” (9 p.m., CBS).

¢ The series “Smash Lab” (9 p.m., Discovery) returns to put revolutionary ideas and technologies to the test.

¢ Awaiting the stork on “Tori & Dean: Home Sweet Hollywood” (9 p.m., Oxygen).