Dial File -- Steve Bornfeld: Buddy, can you spare 15 minutes?

Steve Bornfeld is the Sun features editor. His television column appears Fridays. Reach him at [email protected] or 259-4081.

Got the attention span of a gnat on speed?

If you do -- and haven't raced through Entertainment Weekly, surfed 60 websites, clicked through channels 1-101 and given the dog a shampoo, rinse and blow-dry since starting this column -- UPN's got an S-O-S for Y-O-U.

The network that bestowed upon an ungrateful nation full 30-minute versions of "Shasta McNasty," "The Secret Diary of Desmond Pfeiffer" and "Home Boys in Outer Space" -- acts still not punishable by law -- is reportedly considering cutting that format in half.

UPN might produce 15-minute programs to rope in the notorious remote-control "grazers" who can't sit still for more than one "Nash Bridges" car crash or a couple of "Friends" breast jokes or Regis wondering if that's your final answer before flexing that fidgety finger.

The UPN plan: Develop a series of slapstick shorts in the "Three Stooges" mode. Although there's no guarantee that the network will air the shows, spokesman Paul McGuire told the Associated Press: "This is just a way to see if we can come up with something in a nontraditional format" (which, decades back, was tradition personified).

First a game show explosion, now 15-minutes shows. Here we stand at the dawn of a new century and TV is partying like it's ... 1950? How many of you out there like Ike?

Hey, it's A-OK in this corner. The game show craze -- triggered by "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire" and aped by "Greed" and the upcoming "Winning Lines," "21," "Survivor" and "Who Wants to Marry a Multi-Millionaire" -- surely won't last.

But at least craze ignitor "Millionaire" accomplished something reminiscent of the '50s, when game shows were TV's gravy: Viewers rallied around a show en masse, creating the kind of common TV reference, nationwide buzz and shared experience that was the medium's strength in its pioneering days, before cable and satellite systems blasted the mass audience into tiny shards of specialized viewing.

Now UPN might revive another hallmark of early television, bringing us full circle from the fledgling tube's initial 15-minute shows through the half-hour sitcoms, hour-long dramas, 90-minute specials, two-hour TV movies, 20-hour miniseries and back to ... the 15-minute show.

Of course, the slapsticky "Three Stooges"-style model UPN is starting with could quickly grow tiresome, but the form itself might be the future of sitcoms, which have been playing second banana to dramas on the networks lately.

Beyond the stated goal of keeping wandering eyeballs glued to UPN, it's got other worthy possibilities. Those accustomed to 30-minute and 60-minute storytelling can invest less time in a show while still being rewarded with story completion and payoff. And to those raised on three-minute shows -- MTV videos -- it'll actually play like less-long-winded long-form programming.

Creatively, it could blow a fresh wind through television's stale structure. In a 15-minute format: The narrative pace would have to quicken; there would be less time to be bogged down with peripheral characters who don't advance the story or the comedy, the time constraint narrowing the focus to a few well-drawn main characters; say sayonara to script "padding" -- lame jokes and pointless schtick in many bloated, badly-written 30-minutes sitcoms; and the overall writing would have to be sharper and leaner to wrap up a story line in half the time.

And, hey, at only 15 minutes, maybe they'd even be commercial-free!

But whereas the original incarnation of the 15-minute show was simply a baby medium mimicking its older brother, radio, before discovering its own style -- radio was the era's dominant form of home entertainment, featuring 15-minute series, and TV needed a starting point -- this is TV's reaction to its own rapid-fire revolution in the decades since.

Half/half-hour shows, once a product of limited broadcasting capabilities and resources, might now, in the age of unlimited broadcasting capabilities and resources, re-emerge as a strategy to coax viewers to sit still after years of being conditioned -- by TV itself -- not to sit still.

Pick your cliche: Everything old is new again. What goes around comes around. Back to the future.

Or maybe just: Don't touch that dial.

Croon a Tune: "I'm not the kind to kiss and tell, but I've been seen with Farrah."

True enough: Lee Majors, Farrah Fawcett's ex-hubby -- remember her long-ago billing as Farrah Fawcett-Majors? -- was both the star and theme song warbler (warbling the above inside-jokey lyric) for our last quiz in that last millennium, featuring "The Fall Guy."

The 1981-86 series on ABC about Hollywood stuntman Colt Seavers -- inspired by the Burt Reynolds flick "Hooper" -- was the sixth successful series for Majors, following "The Big Valley," "The Virginian," "Owen Marshall, Counselor at Law," "The Six Million Dollar Man" and "Tour of Duty."

Stand-up Tune Crooners who caught "The Fall Guy" were: Rich Kackstetter, Doug Weise, Andrew Hatcher, Dollie Ferguson, Tony Varchetto, La-La, Shelley Bristol, Joe Lacy, Dick Fuller and Daniel Brown.

As Croon a Tune crosses the millennial divide, call the same number from last millennium -- 259-4012 (give it four rings) -- to listen to a little music, answer a little question, leave a little information and get a little famous.

How much less could you want out of life?

Closing Credits: Could we be nearing the end of "sweeps" periods -- and the end of TV (un)civilization as we know it?

Such is the possible word from Nielsen Media Research, whose handwritten diaries, filled out by those lucky chosen-at-random families four times a year, have traditionally provided the networks with detailed demographic information about who sees what shows where. Then, in a TV world ruled by viewers too young to vote -- except for class president -- networks use the numbers to set local advertising rates for affiliates.

The result has always been the maddening quarterly quagmire known as "sweeps" -- in February, May, July and November -- in which the networks stuff their schedules with their best shows, all battling each other -- as viewers lose.

To the rescue: Nielsen is experimenting with electronic data by equipping 500 Boston families with "people meters" -- which measure who is watching what in a given household without causing writer's cramp among Nielsen families or triggering carpel tunnel syndrome lawsuits -- that could eventually collect local demo info year-round, eliminating the need for sweeps.

(And because it's plugged directly into TV sets and not dependent on viewer honesty -- sort of a pop culture lie detector -- it also eliminates that pesky tendency among embarrassed Nielsen families to officially claim they're watching "Nova" while actually screaming for a pile driver on "WWF Smackdown!")

Sweeps, as you might recall, are also infamous for local newscasts teeming with "investigative reports" on teenage hookers, breast enlargement surgeries, penile implants, transvesticism, transsexualism, sado-masochism and a host of other hard-hitting "isms."

And if the Boston experiment succeeds?

"Tonight at 11: Join us for our 10-part journey into the sexy, secretive, sensuous, seductive world of virgins."

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