Sheep in the Big City is an American animated television series created by Mo Willems for Cartoon Network. The 9th of the network's Cartoon Cartoons, the series' pilot first premiered as part of Cartoon Network's "Cartoon Cartoon Summer" on August 18, 2000, before its official debut on November 17, 2000, where it aired until April 7, 2002, with repeats until 2003.Willems previously created The Off-Beats for Nickelodeon's KaBlam! before working on this animated show. The series follows a runaway sheep named Sheep in his new life in "the Big City", where he tries to avoid a secret military organization. It also features several unrelated sketches and shorts, similar to those from The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle and Friends. With an emphasis on sophisticated (in particular, literal) humor, using different forms of rhetoric from characters to plots, it included comic references to filmmaking and television broadcasting.

At the time, the premiere of Sheep in the Big City was the highest-rated premiere for a Cartoon Network original series.The animation services for the series were handled by the Korean animation studio Rough Draft Korea. This was Cartoon Network's first original series produced by the animation studio Curious Pictures, who would later go on to produce Codename: Kids Next Door in 2002.