:) I hear you, and didn't root for the FBI to succeed, either. Mind you, I did want Stan to find out and would have felt narratively betrayed if the show had ended with him either still in the dark or never given the chance to actually confront Philip and Elizabeth post reveal, but that's not the same as the FBI succeeding, it's about pay off to a key relationship within the show.
...not completely unrelated but still in another show, the "not the intended audience" factor for me also came when watching Alias; when Sydney, our heroine, working for the CIA, tells her mother, Irina Derevko, formerly a KGB agent undercover as Laura Bristow, now independent, "you are a traitor to this country". Because well, she's not - it was never Irina's country and she was doing exactly what Sydney does in the present. Mind you, it was ic for Sydney in s2 to say so, because the reveal that her mother was alive and had never been Laura Bristow, an American literature professor, is relatively new for her - she doesn't think of her mother as a Russian yet. But I bet Abrams and friends also assumed the audience would be with Sydney in this matter.
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...not completely unrelated but still in another show, the "not the intended audience" factor for me also came when watching Alias; when Sydney, our heroine, working for the CIA, tells her mother, Irina Derevko, formerly a KGB agent undercover as Laura Bristow, now independent, "you are a traitor to this country". Because well, she's not - it was never Irina's country and she was doing exactly what Sydney does in the present. Mind you, it was ic for Sydney in s2 to say so, because the reveal that her mother was alive and had never been Laura Bristow, an American literature professor, is relatively new for her - she doesn't think of her mother as a Russian yet. But I bet Abrams and friends also assumed the audience would be with Sydney in this matter.