One of the oldest shows still on the air is colliding with one of television’s most recent smash hits. The Simpsons recently spoofed HBO’s award-winning series The Pitt.
While The Pitt has been lauded for its gritty, realistic portrayal of the medical profession, The Simpsons took playful jabs at the genre’s tropes that the series occasionally falls into. Although The Simpsons version of the Pittsburgh Medical Trauma Center is a veterinary hospital.
The bit starts with a nurse, who appears to be based on Katherine LaNessa’s Dana, gruffly announcing a “code purple”. The Simpsons’ family greyhound Santa’s Little Helper is rushed into the ER by a Doctor with an obvious likeness to Noah Wyle’s Dr. Michael ‘Robby’ Robanivitch. The spoof version has Robby shout out commands such as “30 CCs of plastamin” and “4 heliostic probes,” before alluding to The Pitt’s aforementioned realism by demanding “the most ultra realistic gory stomach pump we’ve got.”
The naive intern is a staple of the medical drama. Meredith Grey and her cohort are beginning their medical careers at the start of Grey’s Anatomy, and for the first season of Scrubs, the majority of the main cast are interns. The Simpsons would hit this on the head when the animated Robby shouts for the “nice mousy intern who always maintains her youthful optimism in the face of the constant trauma”. Robby then cuts off the intern, who appears to be based off Fiona Dourif’s (Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency, The Blacklist) Dr. Cassie McKay. He briefly comforts Santa’s Little Helper before shouting for McKay to “cram that tube down his throat”. The male doctor was voiced by Wyle himself.
The Simpsons is now on its 37th season, premiering almost four decades ago in 1989. The Pitt’s second season premiered on January 8th of 2026. The series’s first season won five Emmys at the 77th Primetime Emmy Awards.