Maul shadowlord was terrible. Filoni is just unable to graduate from empty calories storytelling.
Story: In the first episode, Maul says he wants to stay in the shadows.... And then immediately raids a police station, and then brings down a bridge on a public highway for everyone to see. For some reason they decided to have the antagonists be the 11th brother and Marrok. 2 nothing characters, who get no character in this show, who's fates are already sealed in terrible endings. 11th brother gets low diffed by ahsoka and turns into smoke, and Marrok dies in one of the worst shows in modern history and also turns into smoke. Both of our primary antagonists can not die in the fights they're in, and don't get ANY character work through the entire 10 episodes to even make us care about them. It is simply there for the cool factor because "omg bird skull mask so cool". And they are further jobbified by not even being able to kill a child Jedi. Vader shows up for 20 minutes and gets toyed with be people a 10th of his level, it's insane. No charater development, no intrigue, just there to be "cool" despite him bumbling around and slowly swinging for 20 minutes.
Devon and Mauls relationship is incredibly hollow. We don't ever actually learn what Devons history is, what shaped who she is, and where she's at now. All we get is Mauls vague ideas as to what he believes her past to be, with no comment from her. This is standard filoni not committing to anything interesting and leaving the audience to craft the story in their heads.
The portrayal of Palpatines relationship with Maul is downright clownish. That palpy was torturing him constantly in the most evil way possible. Palps would not do this, and the Plagueis books version of this story is far superior. Maul was not a jobber, he was a legitimate apprentice to palpy who was trained and taught the sith lessons, not just mindlessly tortured and used as a tool. Star wars fans have sort of reconned and jobberfied Maul to have always been a temporary plan from Sidious, and not a real sith, just an assassin. He has Darth in his name bros, lmfao.
Animation and fight scenes: the fights are just straight up terrible, but sadly just the standard of the TCW universe that people eat up for some reason. Every gunfight is just nonsensical. We have an open bridge fight with no cover and blasters firing everywhere with no one hitting anything, people running in open areas being shot at by 15 troopers and not even getting hit. Every lightsaber fight is nonsensical movements that will pause on locked sabers every few seconds and it is actually hard to follow what a given person is doing.
It is so depressing that this, the Tales shows, Bad Batch, etc are all so positively received that we will never see filoni graduate from this kindergarten level trash, wasting ideas on fanfic that only survives because of vibes. Despite working on this franchise for over a decade, Filoni STILL can't make a single story that's actually worth anything, and is lauded with praise over and over again.