Dial File: Hey, Sexy, Wanna talk about sex?

Friday, Jan. 22, 1999 | 10:07 a.m.

SASSA GOES SEXLESS!

Tabloid tendencies aside, Sassa isn't actually going sexless, and it isn't even sexless, but less sex.

Still, it made news when newly deflowered (as a network nabob) NBC Entertainment President Scott Sassa declared that he wants to nix a lot of the naughtiness on his network. Or, to let the ex-cable exec tell it: "We could use a few more words between 'Hello' and 'Would you sleep with me?' "

Is that the sound of the Earth spinning off its axis?

Sassa, the one-time Ted Turner point man at the Mouth of the South's cable conglomerate, has tossed down the gauntlet against galloping gonads. Perhaps he senses a growing public weariness with widespread TV whoopee -- punctuated by presidential prurience. Not to mention all those horny little bed-hoppers on "Friends," "Veronica's Closet" and "Just Shoot Me."

Don't get too, uh, excited: No network is about to embrace celibacy. There isn't much moolah in massive morality. A touch of "Touched by An Angel" is as much righteousness as the ratings will bear.

But there could be moolah in moderation, and wisdom in Sassa's sense of TV's sexual overkill in a graying America -- those baby boomers aren't getting any younger -- that has heard enough about semi-sleazy sex from dignified news anchors trying not to wince and politicians trying not to pant. (Then again, if the president is any barometer, baby boomer sex urges are still pretty spry).

And you've got to appreciate the irony: Sassa, a disciple of cable -- the racier standards of which nudged ... pushed ... shoved the networks into friskier fare -- taking over the top-rated broadcast entity and vowing to stop sprinkling Spanish Fly in producers' coffee mugs.

Still, Sassa's statement is a start on the sex issue that, for all the heat broadcasters have taken from hotheaded critics -- including hotheaded me -- is a difficult dilemma.

Sexual standards-wise, pay cable (HBO, Showtime, Cinemax, etc.) is a country without borders -- but with the enormously liberating mandate to appeal to a smaller citizenry in the smaller cable world, instead of the public-at-large. Producers of original series and movies have limitless freedom, although they've had the good sense, so far, to avoid depictions of such frowned-upon hobbies as incest and bestiality.

Still, like children set loose in a toy store, they first gorged, then grew bored with their new toy, which breeds selectivity. Now, cable sex (with exceptions, and there will always be exceptions) seems proportional to the stories being told. Important, but not incessant. Put another way: adult .

Conversely, networks suffer from adolescent angst. Hugely burdened by being at the mercy of a mass audience that, by-and-large, insists (at least publicly) on clothed entertainment, but challenged by cable's carnality, they are reduced to hinting, alluding, snickering about sex -- as adolescents will do. Sex is a smarmy double entendre instead of actual lovemaking. Nudity is a cop's keister on "NYPD Blue" -- roughly the equivalent of a rowdy 16-year-old mooning pedestrians as the school bus breezes by.

The juxtaposition is jarring: Whippersnapper cable has mastered the Kama Sutra. Wrinkled, balding broadcast TV is still fumbling with that blasted bra strap in the back seat.