ABC is airing The Mystery of Richard Simmons: A Diane Sawyer Special at 9 p.m. The one-hour broadcast looks back at what happened when Richard Simmons vanished from public view in 2014.
That disappearance set off years of speculation. Friends and journalists tried and failed to reach Simmons that year, while reports said he was being held against his will by his manager and family. Simmons denied those accounts in a phone interview with the Today show.
What followed only deepened the mystery. Soon after he stepped away, Simmons had a hospitalization that was never fully explained publicly, and his Beverly Hills exercise studio closed. The special arrives now because the story has taken on a final chapter: Simmons died in 2024, and the Los Angeles Coroner’s office reportedly said he died from complications from recent falls and heart diseases.
Diane Sawyer hosts the special as renewed attention turns to Simmons’ life and career, and to the unanswered questions about how he spent his final years. ABC affiliates can carry the program on local television, and it is also available through several live-TV services, including Hulu + Live TV. DIRECTV offers ABC in its MyNews Genre Pack for $39.99 a month with a five-day free trial. Fubo carries ABC in its Sports + News package, regularly priced at $55.99 a month, with a $10 discount for new signups, 28 channels, unlimited cloud DVR recording and viewing on up to 10 screens at once. Sling Select offers 10+ live TV channels, thousands of on-demand titles and streaming on up to three devices at once, though it does not offer a free trial at this time.
The reason the richard simmons special matters today is simple: it does not just revisit a celebrity disappearance, it tries to settle what can still be settled about one of pop culture’s most private public figures. The rest is what the broadcast can finally answer, or cannot.
