Richard Simmons spent the final years of his life asking for one thing: to be left alone. A new ABC special, hosted by Diane Sawyer, suggests we still cannot grant him that wish.

The hour-long program, which premiered Monday night and is now streaming free on ABC platforms, revisits the circumstances surrounding Simmons's withdrawal from public life around 2014. For nearly a decade before his death in July 2024, the man who once bounded across morning television in sequined tank tops and Dolphin shorts simply vanished—prompting a podcast investigation, tabloid surveillance, and a missing-persons mythology that refused to accept the most boring explanation: he was tired.

The Sawyer treatment

Diane Sawyer brings her usual gravitas to the proceedings, interviewing friends, former colleagues, and fitness industry figures who knew Simmons during his heyday. The special reportedly includes never-before-seen footage and attempts to address the conspiracy theories that proliferated during his absence—claims of elder abuse, hostage situations, and shadowy housekeepers that Simmons himself repeatedly denied. ABC is positioning the program as a tribute, but the framing is unmistakably investigative, promising to "reveal what really happened" when cameras stopped rolling.

The parasocial problem

Simmons was, by any measure, one of the most accessible celebrities of his era. He answered fan mail personally. He called struggling dieters at home. He cried on camera, hugged strangers, and built a brand on radical emotional availability. When he stopped, the withdrawal felt like abandonment to millions who had never actually known him. The 2017 podcast "Missing Richard Simmons" treated his privacy as a puzzle to be solved rather than a boundary to be respected, and the cultural response was instructive: we felt entitled to him in a way we rarely feel entitled to reclusive actors or musicians.

What the special cannot answer

Simmons's brother, Lenny, has said Richard was happy in his final years—painting, reading, enjoying his cats. The Los Angeles Police Department confirmed in 2017 that he was not being held against his will. Yet the special exists because those answers feel insufficient. We want drama, conspiracy, a third act that justifies our concern. The alternative—that a 76-year-old man simply grew weary of performing joy for strangers—is too mundane to monetize.

Our take

Diane Sawyer is a consummate professional, and the special will likely be tasteful, even moving. But the impulse behind it remains uncomfortable. Richard Simmons gave decades of his life to people he never met. The least we could offer in return is the dignity of not turning his death into content. Some mysteries are not ours to solve, and some silences deserve to remain unbroken.