Beth Phoenix appeared on Busted Open Radio this week. She discussed the changes that WWE wants from the commentary team with NXT 2.0, which includes simply being themselves.
“We are being encouraged right now to just be ourselves more and show more personality,” she said. “Don’t be so married to the agenda and walking the straight line, let’s just have fun out there. If we mess up, we mess up. We’re human. We don’t want to be perceived as robots. We want to bring personality and a big part of ourselves to the show.”
Beth Phoenix then spoke about the changes taking place and how the commentary team have spoken about it all. She revealed there is now more of a focus on developing the characters.
“Yes, 100%. We all had a meeting of the minds to get together with this new directive, we are really trying to create characters that are TV ready to go to Raw and SmackDown,” she stated. “We have an important role in that, and that’s bringing forward who are these people, who are these characters? They can come out and dress the part like a Tony D’Angelo, but it’s our job to really get the audience engaged and asking questions and do what we can to make these characters and stories come to life. Not that we weren’t doing that before. But I would dare to say the whole process has just been accelerated.”
Phoenix discussed the changes WWE has made to the brand more generally. She said that it has been a lot of fun seeing the talent just try things in the ring.
“We are freshening up the brand more than anything. Focusing on more on, instead of NXT being really branded as the yellow brand or the little engine that could, we are looking to produce stars. Like that’s our entire directive our entire motivation. The matches you see are not only just reps for these stars, but for everybody to push the envelope a little bit. I love that,” Phoenix stated. “We are uncuffing a lot of the talent and giving them an opportunity to just try some stuff, just try it. Let us reel you back in instead of telling you, ‘you’ve got to light it up.’”
