After several increasingly large productions, Dollars & Donuts had slowed, and for a while there didn’t seem to be much momentum toward the next big thing. Daryl felt aimless, creatively unfulfilled, and at times genuinely wondered whether the partnership had run its course.

The response was to go smaller. Webseries, loose experiments, projects that could actually get made without waiting for another massive production to come together. Retard Strength came out of that stretch.

The idea originated with Robert Ruiz, who proposed a mockumentary built around his real-life band with Becker Von Felsburg and Jared Coons. Daryl and Rob worked out the basic shape together, then Daryl and Lorenzo Ocon began filming unscripted interviews that became the spine of the series. What started as a simple documentary parody quickly expanded into something closer to an ensemble comedy.

Becker helped build out his character’s strange personal mythology, including the introduction of Chris Ross as his inexplicable manservant. Rob brought in Shaun Maharaj as the band’s spectacularly ineffective manager. The loose structure gave everybody room to improvise, and for Daryl the handheld style and lack of rigid planning offered a welcome break from the machinery of the Dead Right productions.

Michael Martin was initially uninvolved, though he did briefly step back into the producer role as the project gathered steam. That produced one of the more perfect images of the period. HITwall Studios was a grimy industrial rehearsal space in South San Francisco where bands gathered to practice, drink, smoke, and generally behave like bands in a grimy industrial rehearsal space. Michael arrived with cheese and crackers. The attempt at professionalism lasted about as long as expected.

Around the same time, Daryl had become friends with jazz singer Lori Carsillo and invited her into the production as her stage persona, Lola Bombay. Coming directly from a very different musical world, Lori showed up slightly hungover and completely game, then performed a jazz rendition of the band’s lowbrow anthem “Diarrhea Forever.” It was exactly the kind of collision the series thrived on. The cameo also began a much longer collaboration between Lori and Dollars & Donuts, largely because she proved immediately willing to walk into whatever strange situation the group had created and commit to it.

Then the fake dysfunction started becoming real. As production continued, Rob Ruiz became increasingly frustrated and began pointing out that the experience was reminding him exactly why he had quit the actual band in the first place. Eventually, he quit the series too. Jared and Martin Madden followed. That destroyed the planned ending, which had originally built toward a triumphant Retard Strength reunion show. So, Daryl stopped trying to save the reunion and made the collapse the ending.

With Becker left as the only remaining member, the final chapter turns into a desperate search for replacements. He eventually assembles Powerhouse Blood Addiction, a fake band made up of real hardcore musicians, including Tyler Della and Israel Navarro. The joke lands when the new lineup immediately proves more functional than Retard Strength ever was and fires Becker from his own band.

The conclusion became one of the series’ best accidental ideas. The problem with Retard Strength, it turns out, was Retard Strength. Rob later praised the ending, acknowledging that his own departure had forced the series into a better final joke than the one originally planned.

For a project born out of creative frustration, Retard Strength ended up doing exactly what Daryl needed at the time. It was smaller, looser, messier, and more alive than the projects he had been waiting around to make.