The Loud House is an American animated sitcom created by Chris Savino that premiered on Nickelodeon on May 2, 2016. The series revolves around the chaotic everyday life of a boy named Lincoln Loud, who is the middle child and only son in a large family of 11 children. It is set in a fictional town in southeastern Michigan called Royal Woods, based on Savino's hometown of Royal Oak. The series was pitched to the network in 2013 as a two-minute short film entered in the annual Animated Shorts Program. It entered production the following year. The series is based on Savino's own childhood growing up in a large family, and its animation is largely influenced by newspaper comic strips.
Since its debut, the series has gained high ratings, becoming the top-rated children's animated series on American television within its first month on the air. The series has received considerable media attention and nominations at both the 28th and the 29th GLAAD Media Awards for its inclusion of Howard and Harold McBride, two supporting characters who are an interracial gay married couple. Their introduction into the series was reported in the news as being historic and caused a rating surge. In May 2017, the characters of Lincoln Loud and Clyde McBride were featured on the front cover of Variety as an example of diverse characters in children's television.
As of August 2025, nine seasons of the series have been broadcast. The series has spawned a multimedia franchise, including the spin-off series The Casagrandes, which aired from October 2019 to September 2022, an animated feature film that was released on Netflix in August 2021, a live-action television film that premiered in November 2021, and live-action series The Really Loud House that premiered in November 2022. Additionally, a second live-action television film A Really Haunted Loud House premiered in September 2023, as well as a second animated feature film, The Casagrandes Movie, which premiered in March 2024 on Netflix. A third animated film, titled No Time to Spy, premiered in June 2024 on Paramount+ and Nickelodeon. A fourth animated film, titled Naughty or Nice, premiered in November 2025.
Lincoln Loud is the middle child and only boy in a family of eleven children residing in the fictional town of Royal Woods, Michigan. He has ten sisters, each with a distinctive personality: bossy eldest child Lori, ditzy fashionista Leni, musician Luna, comedian Luan, athletic Lynn Jr., gloomy poetic goth Lucy, polar opposite twins Lana and Lola, child genius Lisa, and baby Lily. Lincoln often breaks the fourth wall to explain to the viewers the chaotic conditions and sibling relationships of the household, and continually devises plans to make his life in the Loud House better.
During the first four seasons, Lori, Leni, Luna, and Luan were in high school, Lynn was in middle school, and Lincoln, Lucy, Lana, Lola, and Lisa were in elementary school. In the fifth season, the Loud siblings aged up a year, with Lori entering college, Lincoln going to middle school, and Lily starting preschool.
Series creator Chris Savino grew up as the ninth of ten children, having five sisters and four brothers. Throughout his childhood, he had been fascinated by comic strips and cartoons, and since he was the quiet one among his siblings, he would frequently sneak away to read or draw comics in a style that mimicked the ones he read in newspapers. By his senior year at Dondero High School, Savino learned about careers in the animation industry and immersed himself in every animation book that he could find at his local libraries. In 1990, Savino received word that Big House Blues, a cartoon that he had viewed at an animation festival earlier that year, had been picked up for a full series in the form of The Ren & Stimpy Show. In response to the news, he mailed a letter and some drawings to its creator, John Kricfalusi, which secured him an opportunity to join that series' staff.
In 2013, Savino was introduced to the Nickelodeon Animated Shorts Program by executive Jenna Boyd. He was presented the opportunity to pitch three ideas as a 2+1⁄2-minute short for the program, out of which one would be picked. The executives selected his idea that involved a big family, which was about a male rabbit with twenty-five sisters dealing with the chaos of living among an extensively large immediate family. Savino had decided to make the characters rabbits because he had come fresh off the production of Kick Buttowski: Suburban Daredevil, which had an all-human cast, and knew that standards and practices are typically more restrictive with human characters, which gave him the desire to explore more extreme physical humor that is generally accepted with animal-based cartoons; he also considered making the characters mice when one staff member took issue with the rabbits. After presenting his pitch, Boyd advised Savino to consider making the characters human, deeming that to make it more likely to get his pitch sold. Boyd's advice inspired Savino to base the series on his own experiences growing up in a large family, so he retooled his concept art of the short's protagonist (at the time named Warren, a reference to rabbit warrens) so it depicted a human and pared down his 25 sisters to ten, which he deemed to be much more manageable and biologically believable from a human standpoint and used it as a reflection of his experiences growing up in a family of ten. The idea of the Loud family being rabbits became reused as Lincoln's dream in the Season 3 episode "White Hare".
While the series was primarily inspired by Savino's experiences growing up in a large family, it was never intended to be autobiographical on his part; to reflect this, Savino characterized Lincoln as the polar opposite of him, stating that "Lincoln’s the type of kid who always has a plan" and that "if there’s something that he wants, and he knows that he has 10 siblings who are basically obstacles, then he’s going to do what it takes to get what he wants." Many of the writers, particularly those who had siblings themselves, would give inputs on things that happened to them as kids, which then blossomed into the premises for episodes of the show. During development, the writing staff took heavy inspiration from The Brady Bunch due to its similar focus on the chaos held by a large family and the heart shared by all of its members, as well as animated series such as Hey Arnold!, The Simpsons and Daria due to their use of young characters "who were allowed to be more flawed and real than their live-action counterparts" within the main cast.
Savino named the main characters and other core elements in the series after various things in his life. His five sisters became the inspirations for Lori, Luan, Lynn, Lana, and Lisa; Lola and Luna were named after two dachshunds that were owned by Savino and his mother-in-law, respectively; Lucy and Lily were two names that Savino and his wife had intended to use in the event that they had daughters; Leni was named after Lennie Small from Of Mice and Men; and Lincoln was named after E Lincoln Avenue, the street that Savino grew up on as a child. The short had always been titled "The Loud House", though its name was originally only in reference to the chaotic nature of a family of that size; a Nickelodeon employee named Scott Kreamer suggested that the family's name be Loud, which Savino caught onto, thinking it was a clever idea since it would give the siblings alliterative names. The siblings having an alliterative naming theme was further inspired by writer Karla Sakas Shropshire, who grew up with three siblings, all having names beginning with K. The Loud family's pets, Charles, Cliff, Geo and Walt, were named after Charles M. Schulz, Cliff Sterrett, George Herriman, and Walt Kelly— the creators of the comic strips Peanuts, Polly and Her Pals, Krazy Kat, and Pogo, respectively— which Savino has cited as some of his biggest influences on the series. The Loud family's street, Franklin Avenue, was named after Benjamin Franklin Elementary School, which Savino attended as a child. The city the series takes place in, Royal Woods, had its name derived partially from Savino's hometown of Royal Oak, and partially from Huntington Woods, the hometown of story editor and later showrunner Michael Rubiner.