“I think it’s absolutely human nature that if somebody is number one and keeps telling you that they’re number one and rubbing it in that they’re number one, that when you suddenly are no longer number one and not even on air, people are going to revel in your downfall,” Dunn said. “And to be honest, I think it didn’t come as a surprise to Craig that there were people who were gleeful about his downfall.”
“Especially in this day and age,” McGovern added. “There are very few folks that show that empathy and that graciousness. Everyone is very quick to run to the edge of the pit and start throwing stones when anybody of any kind of celebrity has some kind of a fall.”
Even now, with the film coming out, Carton has been criticized. “Craig Carton obviously still doesn’t get it,” read the headline of a piece published by the Staten Island Advance following the release of the trailer for Wild Card. Asked what they would say to those who question why Carton is worthy of such a potentially redemptive project, Dunn answered that the theme of Carton’s story—the rise and fall of a public figure—was timeless.
“This is a human-interest story of somebody who’d worked for 30 years to get to the top of their profession, and successfully done that, and blew it all up because of their own mistakes,” he said. “And Craig is also very aware of the fact that gambling is an illness, and he’s very aware of the fact that other people may suffer the sort of issues that he’s suffered.”
Added McGovern, “If people walk away at least understanding how this could happen—and it could happen to anybody; everybody has a story, everybody has demons—I think then there’s going to be a little bit of satisfaction in that for Martin and me. That at least people say, ‘Okay, I don’t like the guy still,’ or ‘I still love the guy,’ or whatever you feel, ‘but at least now I can understand how it happened.’”
Wild Card has evolved greatly in just a few short months, thanks to several late-breaking developments. In June, after serving just over a year of his sentence, Carton was released after completing rehab programs. (He remains under home confinement.) In a final interview with Dunn and McGovern, conducted after he got home, Carton appears chastened by the experience of jail and expresses remorse to those he hurt, including his family and former coworkers.
“I have to be upfront with who I am and I have to do that 24/7. That can never take a day off,” Carton told the filmmakers. “The pledge I made to the people who did stay with me through prison is that I’ll do that. They deserve me to be straight with them, honest with them. And if I ever go back on the pledge, I don’t deserve for those people to be there for me.”
The documentary ends with a postscript revealing that Carton has “negotiated” a radio return. Last week, the New York Post reported that WFAN, which is now owned by Entercom—a company I worked for between 2018 and 2019—plans to hire Carton for a time slot formerly and famously occupied by his old rival Francesa. (Carton was replaced on the WFAN morning show by Gregg Giannotti.)
But regardless of his eventual landing spot, Carton is reentering a very different cultural landscape. Carton’s final show on WFAN occurred one month before the dawn of the #MeToo movement; he was released from prison as widespread protests in support of social justice spread around the country. Even Howard Stern, who inspired Carton and so many other talk show hosts and shock jocks, was forced to reconcile with his previously objectionable behavior after a long-lost video of Stern wearing blackface and using the N-word to spoof Ted Danson resurfaced this past summer.