Ken Burns knows he only has so much time left to make a certain number of movies. It’s getting harder to pick and choose which of the many ideas for his trademark multipart documentaries will get his full attention—but choose he must.

“As I get older, I get greedier. Because you realize there are so many subjects that you want to touch, and there’s not gonna be enough time to do them all,” Burns, 67, said this week from his home and offices

George W. Bush left office over a decade ago, with his eight years as president long been consigned to the provenance of historians. However one might have felt about the 43rd president at the time of his administration, it was time to give those eight years of the first decade of the new millennium a second look.

“‘American Experience’ is very clever because they time these things so that enough time has gone by so that it really is ‘history’