Rewatching “The Godfather” and its sequels in quick succession last month, as AMC’s much-beloved “Breaking Bad” was still hurtling toward its finale, it struck me that much of the visceral, emotional and psychological impact of Coppola’s trilogy would lend itself rather well to the weekly serialization of cable television, where, even more than its amber-steeped veneer of classicism, its show-stopping roadside tommygunnings and equine decapitations alike would no doubt be rapturously received. Consider the scene, early in Part II, in which Michael Corleone curtly informs Senator Geary that not only will he forgo the bribery requested of him, but that he will expect the state gaming license fee to be covered by Geary himself — is it so hard to imagine Walter White rebuffing a prospective foe in a similar manner, the camera trained on his face dramatically, the response followed by a sudden cut to commercials or credits? The modern TV drama is founded on gestures of similar pomp and dramatic emphasis, every episode built around little crescendos of intensity and feeling. In televisual terms, “The Godfather” has it all: surprise assassinations, scandals of betrayal, a constant throb of conspiratorial intrigue, the lot of it unfurling with the breadth and sweep of an American epic. In short, “The Godfather” would have been great TV.

Well, it turns out that this observation is not quite as novel as I had anticipated — the point was articulated recently, and more succinctly, by the New Yorker’s Richard Brody, who wrote in August that “Francis Ford Coppola should properly be considered the founder of modern television”. Brody, of course, did not particularly mean this as a compliment to either Coppola or modern television, castigating them for their psychological transparency and the artificiality of their form. (He even takes dear Marlon Brando down a peg, the veneration of whose performance in the film Brody “never understood”.) In any case, for Brody, dreary modern television proceeds directly from “The Godfather”, a symptom of the fact that those who consider Coppola’s films the defining works of the 1970s are the same sorry lot who plop down for “Mad Men” every Sunday night, finding solace in the reminiscent brooding. The meager pleasures that await them on the tube, then — on Twitter, Brody once referred to “Mad Men” itself as nothing more than “a script delivery system” — are merely the exponents of a culture long-since rotted away by Coppola’s vulgar influence, which did, “for adults, the same thing that Spielberg and Lucas would do for children”.

So what do the intellectuals of the world do, then, with all the free time they have not spent binge-watching “The Walking Dead” on Netflix? It isn’t made clear. But Brody does establish a cinematic alternative: “There’s a sort of mental dividing line”, he explains, “between those who see the first two ‘Godfathers’ as the great movies of the time and those who consider Cassavetes’s films to be the era’s supreme creations”. Now, this may be only anecdotal, but I personally know very few cinephiles, bloggers or critics who define their affection for either Coppola or Cassavetes in opposition to the other, and in fact I suspect most of my peers, like me, regard the two directors in similar esteem. For Brody, however, favoring (say) “A Woman Under the Influence” over “The Godfather” isn’t simply a matter of taste — it betrays a preference of sensibility, an alignment of sympathies and predilections with the independent, the improvisatory, the formally and intellectually radical. The division is an almost philosophical one: it’s the choice between the mogul and the maverick, the canonical classic or the perennial outsider.

What’s strange, of course, is that neither of these categorizations are accurate. Francis Ford Coppola may have directed one of the most successful and acclaimed mainstream dramas of all time, but “The Godfather” was in every sense an aberration — an anticipated failure, eyed warily by the studio, assigned to a brash young filmmaker of daring and precocity. And Cassavetes, meanwhile, is hardly the extremist he is often made out to be, confirming his celebrity as an actor in popular films and dabbling resignedly, with both “Too Late Blues” and his last film, “Big Trouble”, in the studio picture. I think that while their interests drew them to different forms of expression, they are not, as artistic figures, strictly oppositional — both are men of a certain recklessness, ambition, and stubborn independence. It strikes me as a mistake to draw an uncrossable line between them, and to suggest that lines of affection and inspiration must be chosen. Why can’t “The Godfather” and the films of Cassavetes both be defining American works of the era — along with, for that matter, the contributions of Robert Altman, Elaine May, John Carpenter, Brian De Palma, and Charles Burnett?

It’s interesting, too, to consider the influence of Cassavetes himself on the modern television drama, to which it seems to me he is not so far removed after all. Brody insists that “the parsing of character and study of intention take precedence” in a series like “The Sopranos” or “Breaking Bad”, and the deference to a legible psychology common to such shows may indeed be rooted in the classicism repopularized by Coppola’s trilogy. But what of the sprawl of something like “The Wire”, in which psychology is often rendered impenetrable and morality incoherent, and for which the intensity and severity of inner lives matter more than the simple delineation of events? Or the subversion and complication of tradition in something like “Deadwood”, in which genre serves as a framework to be dismantled and played with — surely “The Killing of a Chinese Bookie” works in a similar register, with similar interests and methods? Brody praises the way Cassavetes “exploded the very notion of character and plot by finding the interstitial moments that emerge from stories, the explosions and the intimacies that are the surprising and unpredictable mark of people rather than characters”. I would direct him to HBO’s “Enlightened”, which does precisely the same thing.

My point isn’t that the influence of Cassavetes on modern television has been drastically understated. It’s simply that modern television encompasses styles and sensibilities too broad to be characterized as having only one chief inspiration. “The Godfather” may have set certain precedents. But so did much else. This week, The Criterion Collection re-released the box set “John Cassavetes: Five Films”, now upgraded to immaculate high-definition blu-rays, and it provides a good occasion to think about the films anew — about their legacy and historical importance, certainly, but about their vitality and contemporary relevance, too, about the enduring vigor and ferocity of the work. Brody closes his piece by observing that Cassavetes inspired “the strongest currents of the independent cinema”, but it isn’t so clear to which “currents” he refers.

In a film like “The Color Wheel” you can maybe see “Faces” or “Love Streams” — the battered vehemence of the drama, the way the comic brushes up hard against the tragic — but it doesn’t seem quite right to lionize Alex Ross Perry as some kind of Cassavetes heir apparent. And those who explicitly cite Cassavetes as an influence, meanwhile, typically prove insufferable. You can’t just swing a handheld camera around shouting faces and stumble into genius. Think of the tenor of “Faces”, of the way laughter is practically weaponized and everything seems slightly blown-out: it can’t be replicated no matter how hard studied film students with an improv crew think they can develop a passable approximation. If there remains a key difference in the way that Cassavetes and Coppola influenced modern television and cinema, it’s perhaps that only the latter’s work can be faithfully replicated.