Sally Struthers revealed that she experienced intense culture shock when she joined All in the Family in 1971. At just 24 years old, stepping into the role of Gloria Stivic on the CBS sitcom, she told Fox News Digital that she was stunned by many of the things her on-screen father, Archie Bunker (played by Carroll O’Connor), said throughout the series—because she had never heard anything like it before.
The groundbreaking show, which ran from 1971 to 1979, tackled topics such as racism, sexism, homosexuality, and the Vietnam War. These issues were often explored through the lens of O’Connor’s bigoted Archie Bunker as he clashed with his liberal son-in-law, Mike “Meathead” Stivic (Rob Reiner).
“I was very young when I started that show,” Struthers said in a November 2025 interview. “And I was still young when it ended.”
Struthers, who grew up in Portland, Oregon, explained that her upbringing in a “Lutheran Norwegian family” left her completely unprepared for the language used on the show. “There was absolutely no bigotry coming out of their mouths or in their hearts,” she said.
She recalled the early days of rehearsal at CBS in Los Angeles, where the cast would read each script aloud for the writers, producers, and network executives. Some executives even monitored how many times Archie could say “Geez,” arguing that it was a stand-in for “Jesus” and therefore counted as swearing. “They would bargain with Norman Lear about how many words he had to take out,” she said.
Whenever Archie delivered one of his more offensive lines, Struthers often found herself turning to the person next to her and asking, “What does that mean?” She explained, “I didn’t grow up hearing racial slurs or negative epithets. I really didn’t know that all this ugliness existed. So it was a big learning curve for me.”
Struthers has said before that she and co-star Jean Stapleton were often the most shocked by Archie’s harsher insults. “I think Jean and I were more stunned than Rob and Carroll,” she told Closer Weekly in 2021. “We would look at each other like, ‘What was that?’ None of us had any idea what we were in for!”
Struthers also remembered that showrunner Norman Lear knew All in the Family would be controversial from the very beginning. In January 1971, just hours before the first episode aired, he gathered the cast and gave them a blunt warning.
“In the rehearsal hall at CBS Los Angeles, Norman sat us down and said, ‘One of two things will happen tonight. Either it will be a huge hit and you’ll be recognized everywhere you go… Or the public will be outraged by Archie’s language—all his racial slurs—and the show will be canceled after tonight, and we’ll all be out of a job,’” she recalled in a 2017 interview with Grant magazine.
Instead, All in the Family became one of the biggest television successes of the 1970s, winning 22 Emmy Awards over its nine-season run.
Struthers believes the show helped open the door for future series to tackle difficult and taboo subjects. “On All in the Family, you could even hear a toilet flush,” she told Closer Weekly. “That just didn’t happen on family television back then. We opened Pandora’s box.”
