Any evening that begins with someone asking you, “Are you a former child star?” is probably not one that is going to end happily for you, and so it went with my excursion to the Fifth Annual TV Land Awards, which was taped Saturday evening in a hangar at the Santa Monica Airport. (It’ll air at 9 p.m. Sunday, April 22, with multiple repeats.)

In the past, the TV Land Awards have vaguely followed the template of other MTV Networks “awards” shows: jokey, self-referential goofs boasting all manner of silly categories that essentially offer gewgaws and trinkets to anyone who agrees to show up. This year – and I’m not certain this was a great idea – TV Land strove to take itself seriously, placing the emphasis on TV’s heritage and consigning the dopey awards to a mere two, fairly uninspired, categories. (Lindsay Wagner won the “Admirable Apparatus” trophy for playing “The Bionic Woman;” Amy Linker of “Square Pegs” was cited for “Most Beautiful Braces.” Having never watched “Square Pegs,” I had no idea, before the event began, that I was exchanging meaningful glances with a soon-to-be-award-winning actress; had I been more knowledgeable, or less wimpy, I might have been more assertive beyond mere superficial eye contact.)

Instead, the evening was a surprisingly earnest affair, with a few scant moments of levity thrown in for good measure. Kelly Ripa served as host, and so the show began with a series of vignettes placing her (and some fearsome wigs) in the opening-title sequences of old sitcoms – “That Girl,” “The Brady Bunch,” “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” (renamed “The Kelly Tyler Ripa Show”), “Laverne and Shirley,” “The Flying Nun” – you get the idea. In her nun’s habit, Ripa soared over the crowd to the stage. Mainly, the sequence was cute without ever reaching clever.

Ripa declared the evening one to which “celebrate all our guilty pleasures.” But it soon became apparent that TV Land had loftier goals than that.

But forget all that; let’s hear more about me. Upon entering the hangar, I first exchanged pleasantries with an impossibly dapperly dressed young man and his fiancée who go by the moniker of Keyi and Silky, the “new Beyonce and Jay-Z,” Keyi explained. After initially asking whether I was a washed-up has-been (“former child star” was his diplomatic way of putting it) (I had no idea I was looking that desperate for attention), he then reflected upon how cool it was to be in the presence of so many people that he grew up with watching on TV. He added, unintentionally twisting the knife, “And you – you have so much more history with these people.” I replied, “Well, not so much more.” He laughed at my joke – or my vanity.

OK, back to the evening: In a departure from past TV Land Awards shows, lots and lots of recipients were allowed to make acceptance speeches. Not a good idea. Particularly given that some of them were reading their acceptances off the teleprompter.

When Sharon Stone (wearing a flowing green dress with calculated cuts threatening to reveal her cinematically celebrated lady-parts) presented the Medallion Award to “Taxi,” sundry cast members and creators took to the mike to further explicate the societal impact the show had, until Jeff Conaway tried to speak; then, the band, perhaps thinking him too disheveled to be an actual cast member and therefore perhaps an interloper, tried to play him off. Eventually, they dragged the whole group back out onto the stage so that Conaway could deliver his acceptance speech, which was pretty much utterly forgettable and should’ve emboldened the band to cut short future long-winded speeches from award-winning conglomerates, but in fact didn’t.

As tediously self-serving as the “Taxi” acceptance speeches were, those for the mini-series “Roots” seemed to go on even longer. Oscar winners Forest Whitaker and Morgan Freeman introduced the “Anniversary Award” winners, and their eloquence should have provided more than enough explication as to the show’s impact. But, no: Even though LeVar Burton made the salient point that Don Imus’ @ssholery of the past week made the “conversation about race” as urgent as ever, multiple cast members sort of said the same thing, less eloquently, repeatedly. Again, a cast member was thrown to the ditch, then allowed to give his speech: John Amos, who got kind of odd when he described the first African-American to attempt to sail around the world solo as “a true hero,” and forced the crowd to applaud the creator of his current series, “Men in Trees.” After all that, someone at my table observed, “He’s going to be very disappointed when he doesn’t see any of that on TV.”

More observations: Lucille Ball’s son, Desi Arnaz, Jr., should want to bribe TV Land into judiciously trimming his and his sister Lucie’s speech accepting her “Legacy of Laughter” award (did I mention there were numerous bottles of wine at each table? No? Well, there were). A lot of people in the front started reading the teleprompters, rather than watching the presenters, just to see how far afield from their scripts they would go (even some acceptance speeches were loaded on teleprompters). (Heather Mills, who barely rated an appearance here, clearly won the award for violating the Teleprompter obedience measure, which only hints at how much she made Macca’s life a living hell.)

Though it’s pretty certain that “Hee Haw’s” award (the “Entertainer Award”) was the most dubious, TV Land ensured it’d get some respect by reuniting The Judds and bringing in Willie Nelson (who sang his two songs – “The City of New Orleans” and “On the Road Again” – off the teleprompter) as part of its presentation/justification. (Willie’s perennially ragged guitar has gotten so beaten up since the last time I saw him perform that there are holes in it.)

Even more observations: The “Ugly Betty White” parody was downright embarrassing. Thankfully, “Heroes” creator Tim Kring managed to be mildly amusing, in accepting the evening’s “Future Classic” award, by cheekily envisioning that his show would run for 42 seasons, beating out “The Simpsons” for the record for longest-running show by a mere seven episodes. And Christopher Knight, accepting “The Brady Bunch’s” “Pop Culture Award,” noted that the show maintained its innocence even while it cast members were losing theirs.

Yet even more trenchant observations: “Family Affair’s” former child stars Johnny Whitaker and Kathy Garver were on hand to dispense the trophies to the evening’s winners. Why would Keyi think I looked that desperate?