The Emmys’ affection for The Pitt apparently extends well beyond the show itself—and into late night.
The HBO Max medical drama received 25 Emmy nominations this year. But in addition to those, two RFK Jr.-flavored parodies of the series—one from Saturday Night Live and the other from The Daily Show—are competing directly against each other for Outstanding Picture Editing for Variety Programming (Segment).
The Daily Show got there first with “RFK Hospital,” which aired November 21. The fake promo imagined a fast-paced medical drama set at “the only hospital brave enough to follow the advice of the medical health secretary,” Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
In the clip, Michael Kosta plays a doctor who knows that medical science doesn’t have to be based on anything in particular, while the hospital’s staff prescribes treatments including raw milk, fecal-matter baths and defluoridated water.
The segment ends with Kosta’s character learning that a school bus full of children has hit a deer and declaring, “We can still save that deer meat!”
Nearly four months later, SNL aired “MAHAspital,” another fake promo for a fast-paced medical drama inspired by The Pitt and Kennedy’s Make America Healthy Again movement.
The parody was billed as a show “for people who love The Pitt, but can’t stand its phony liberal science.” Its doctors and nurses—played by host Harry Styles, Ben Marshall, Jeremy Culhane, Veronika Slowikowska, and Ashley Padilla—prescribe alternative treatments including raw milk, beef tallow and a “cold plunge in blue jeans.”
That sketch also ends with a dead animal arriving at the hospital, as James Austin Johnson’s RFK Jr. rushes a bear into the emergency room, hoping its meat can still be salvaged for jerky.
The similarities between the two segments did not go unnoticed. After the SNL version aired, Kosta shared on his Instagram Story a screenshot of a Deadline article comparing the sketches.
“Watch the original that we released 6 [sic] months ago,” he wrote alongside a link to The Daily Show’s version.
Now the two segments are facing off at the Emmys.
SNL‘s “MAHAspital” will not only be competing against The Daily Show’s “RFK Hospital,” but also against another SNL pretape. The show’s Home Alone parody starring Ariana Grande was also nominated in the category.
Rounding out the field are the “Moon Mammoths Game Documentary” from Last Week Tonight with John Oliver and the wormhole sequence from the series finale of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.
Notably absent from the category is Jimmy Kimmel Live!’s own blend of The Pitt and Kennedy-inspired medical satire.
That parody aired in January and featured The Pitt star Noah Wyle in a fake public service announcement. After clarifying that he was “not a real doctor,” Wyle rattled off a series of confidently delivered medical claims, including that vaccines turn children into “pansexual furries,” raw chicken is healthier than raw milk, 5G towers cause COVID-19 and vitamin C was invented by Tropicana.
The segment escalated when Wyle received a phone call in which he was offered the job of running the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention under RFK Jr.
Final-round Emmy voting begins August 17 and runs through August 26 at 10 p.m. PT. The winner will be announced at a pre-Emmy Awards ceremony on September 5, 2026.
