Tom Hannifan is excited to accomplish more with IMPACT Wrestling.
WrestleZone recently spoke with IMPACT Wrestling’s Tom Hannifan about his role as commentator and the company’s upcoming Las Vegas TV tapings. When asked if his preparation has changed going from WWE to IMPACT Wrestling, Hannifan said some of it is the same but things are different based on IMPACT having a taping schedule compared to WWE’s live programming.
“Some of it’s still the same. When I got to IMPACT, obviously I love doing live TV. I love having that lack of a safety net,” Tom Hannifan said. “I think it just makes people sharper. So, I love doing live TV and obviously there’s a lot of value in pro wrestling being live and IMPACT Wrestling when they are live, they don’t miss. So, it’s a blast.
“The taping schedule was very familiar to me because it was something that in my early days in NXT before they went live on USA, we were doing very, very regularly. So I was used to a taping schedule. I got used to a taping schedule again with NXT UK when I had the chance to be the lead for them for a little while. So, it wasn’t foreign to me. But when you’re doing a taped batch of shows, you do have the possibility of shooting things out of order.
“You have the possibility of you maybe see 60% of the total show. You see what happens in the arena, obviously, but there’s a lot of things that get taped and change that happened for backstage segments, etc.. God forbid there’s an injury and you have to make a change on the fly. It’s the beauty and the beast of post-production is that there are changes we can make to be current week to week and we can protect certain things.
“But it’s very challenging to put four weeks of TV sometimes in your head all at one time and inevitably you’re not going to get everything. You do your best to get everything. So, it can be really challenging, but it’s a similar procedure, but it’s just different all at the same time. It’s hard to put into words.”
When asked if he’s made any mistakes at a television taping for IMPACT, Hannifan said he’s very hard on himself and admits that sometimes things happen in the moment that he’ll kick himself over.
“First of all, I’m really, really hard on myself. I’m very, very hard on myself personally and professionally on just everything. So there’s stuff that in the moment I’m kicking myself with. This past weekend, I remember talking to Matt Rehwoldt about something — I can’t even remember what it was — I was like, ‘I hated that, that sucked’ and I might listen to it back in three weeks after I’ve forgotten about it and be like, ‘Oh, it wasn’t that bad.’ Or if it isn’t great, ‘great, go back and fix it.’
“It’s also accepting there’s elements, there’s backstage segments that they might be written to occur one way and they have to occur another way. So, I can’t be mad at myself for reacting to what I thought was going to happen in the moment and then it changed a handful of weeks later. We make the appropriate adjustments and then we air the show accordingly.
“So, I’ve got to loosen up on myself at the end of the day. There’s always those situations that it’s not just, ‘Oh, what would it have been when I was in WWE and being produced by that system?’ It’s just what is this system require me to be? Then also what standard do I hold myself and my broadcast team to?”
What do you make of Tom Hannifan’s comments? Do you enjoy Hannifan’s work on commentary for IMPACT Wrestling? Let us know your thoughts by sounding off in the comments section below.
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