The popular true crime podcast “Criminal” will stop at the Academy of Music for a live show on Tuesday, Nov. 19, at 8 p.m. as part of a national tour celebrating its 10th anniversary.

“Criminal,” hosted by co-creator Phoebe Judge, is about “people who’ve done wrong, been wronged or gotten caught somewhere in the middle,” according to the show description. Episode topics in the past year have included the invention of margarine, cheating in fishing tournaments, a case of lottery fraud in Iowa and Pablo Escobar’s hippos. Most of the episode topics come from the production team, but some come from tips sent in by listeners.

Returning to the Pioneer Valley next week will be a personal homecoming for Judge: Her father is from South Hadley, and she lived in the area with her mother this past spring. She mentioned that she used to drop her niece off for summer camp at the Academy of Music, the very venue where she will perform next week.

A podcast is audio-only, of course, but a live podcast show isn’t just going to entail everyone staring at Judge as she talks into a mic; there’ll be narration from her, plus videos and animations from the stories. Judge likes live shows as a contrast to the recording process, which requires her to spend much of her time in a studio. In front of an audience, she said, she can see “if people are laughing at my bad jokes or not responding at all. That’s fun for me, and it makes all that work that we do in the studio worth it.”

This tour will feature seven new stories, including ones about Boy George, pickpocketing, the thumbs-up emoji, FBI raids and famous photographers.

“Some are funny, some are serious, some make you think, I hope,” she said. “Really, we just want to surprise the audience with every new story.”

Of course, not every topic makes for a good potential episode — sometimes that’s because the team can’t get enough people with a direct connection to the story to speak to them. Sometimes there just isn’t enough substance to a story to make a full episode. (As Judge put it, “What we always want to do is make sure we’re not wasting someone’s time, not dragging out a story just to make sure we can get all the ads in.”)

While the show is a true crime podcast, Judge and her team deliberately shy away from exploiting the gory blood-and-guts element of the genre. In fact, when the show began, Judge and co-creator Lauren Spohrer set out to be different from other true crime reporting that they thought “wasn’t giving as much reverence to the stories as was needed, was sensationalizing, in some cases, the worst moment of someone’s life or showing violence just for violence’s sake. And we thought, maybe we can try to do it better.”

To that end, she said, “We take what we do very seriously. We think of ourselves as journalists first, the fact that the podcast is entertainment for people second.”

One of Judge’s favorite episodes is ”Off Leash,” about the leader of a prison dog program who helped a convicted killer escape from jail, but she’s also fond of ”911,” about a mother and 911 operator whose daughter called to report that the restaurant she worked at was being robbed.

Right now, the team is working on their annual end-of-year “Animals Gone Wild” episode, which is about animals causing chaos. The episode is still in progress, but anecdotes she mentioned as part of the production process included a tortoise knocking over a toilet and a curry-covered seagull befuddling a bird hospital.

As Judge wraps up the first decade of “Criminal,” she hopes that the show continues to get even better. She approaches the show with an ethos of perfectionism — “every word that goes into an episode of ‘Criminal,’ we’ve struggled over and fought over and debated” — but she wants to someday make “the perfect episode.”

What would that sound like?

“You know when you watch something or hear something, and at the end of it, the only thing you can say was, ‘Well, that was good’ — that’s what I want,” she said. “I want to listen to the end of an episode of ‘Criminal’ and have no notes. I want to just say, ‘You got it right.’”

“I always have notes: ‘I wish we had a little more pause there,’ or, ‘Phoebe, I wish you had changed that word,” she added. “And I’m ready for the day that I get to say, ‘That was good. No notes.’ ”

Tickets are $29.50-$49.50, not including fees, at aomtheatre.com.