Series Description

The Gloria TV show was a 30 minute comedy series on CBS about a mother who had recently seperated from her husband. She and her young son did their best to go on with life as mom took a new job as an assistant to two veterinarians.

Gloria Cast

Sally Struthers .... Gloria Bunker Stivic
Burgess Meredith .... Doctor Willard Adams
Lou Richards .... Clark V. Uhley Jr.
Christian Jacobs .... Joey Stivic
Jo De Winter .... Doctor Maggie Lawrence

Gloria Trivia:

The Gloria TV show was a "spin-off" of "All in the Family".

In order to explain where Gloria's husband Mike had disappeared to, they said that he had joined a commune. Many fans felt that was a poor reason because, while Mike had begun as a far left-wing liberal on All in the Family, over the series' run he got less and less liberal. In some ways, he was even moving towards conservatism. He most certainly would have been very unlikely to have joined a commune!

In addition to the Gloria TV show, All in the Family spunoff three other series: "Archie Bunker's Place", "The Jeffersons", and "Maude"! The Jeffersons went on to generate it own spin-off titled, "Checking In" and Maude spunoff one named, "Good Times". Checking In and Gloria were the only two of those shows that weren't reasonably successful. One reason that Gloria didn't succeed was that the producers crossed Carroll O'Connor who had played the central character (Archie Bunker) on All in the Family. He appeared briefly in a pilot that was made to sell Gloria. Several of Carroll O'Connor's co-workers/friends from his other series wrote and produced that pilot but it was rejected by CBS who then hired new writers, producers, and cast to make a new pilot. Carrol also found that CBS didn't seem too interested in having him participate in the production of Gloria in any way. In an interview, Sally Struthers said that Mr. O'Connor didn't care much for that and refused to have anything more to do with the show, including not guest-starring! Since Gloria aired immediately following Archie Bunker's Place, that destroyed a terrific opportunity to increase the popularity of both shows by having the stars appear on each other's shows!

Gloria was number 18 on the Nielsen ratings for its only season. That might keep it alive for a second season today with hundreds of cable channels to choose from but it wasn't too good in 1982, years before FOX became the fourth major TV network.

The only Award nomination for Gloria was a not very exciting "Young Artist Award" for "Christian Jacobs" in the category, "Best Young Actor in a New Television Series". Unfortunately for Christian, Rick Schroder ("NYPD Blue") won the award for his role on "Silver Spoons".

Lou Richards guest-starred on the series, "Hawaii Five-0" seven times as seven different characters!