BANGKOK — Actor David Carradine, a born seeker and cult idol who broke through as the willing student called “grasshopper” in the 1970s TV series “Kung Fu” and decades later as leader of an assassin ...

For five decades, “patience, grasshopper” has been the informal tagline for Kung Fu, the classic “Eastern Western” television show that began on February 22, 1972, with a 90-minute ABC TV-movie pilot.

Television series, for the most part, can be categorized by genre. You have your action-adventure series, from The Adventures of Superman in the 1950s up to Percy Jackson and the Olympians, which is ...